On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:46 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.resc...@gmx.de> wrote: > Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote: >> >> ... >> This is why I was thinking about somewhat "data-rdfa-about", >> "data-rdfa-property", "data-rdfa-content" and so on, so that, for the >> purposes of an RDFa processor working on top of HTML5 UAs (perhaps in a test >> phase, if needed at all, of course), an element dataset would give access to >> "rdfa-about", instead of just "about", that is using the prefix "rdfa-" as >> acting as a namespace prefix in xml (hence, as if there were "rdfa:about" >> instead of "data-rdfa-about" in the markup). >> ... > > That clashed with the documented purpose of data-*. > > *If* we want to support RDFa, why not add the attributes the way they are > already named???
Because the issue is that we don't yet know if we want to support RDFa. That's the whole point of this thread. Nobody's given a useful problem statement yet, so we can't evaluate whether there's a problem we need to solve, or how we should solve it. Alex's suggestion, while officially against spec, has the benefit of allowing RDFa supporters to sort out their use cases through experience. That's the back door into the spec, after all; you don't have to do as much work to formulate a problem statement if you can point to large amounts of people hacking around a current lack, as that's a pretty strong indicator that there *is* a problem needing to be solved. As an added benefit, the fact that there's already multiple independent attempts at a solution gives us a wide pool of experience to draw from in formulating the actual spec, so as to make the use as easy as possible for authors. (An example that comes to mind in this regard is rounded corners. Usually you have to break semantics and put in junk elements to get rounded corners on a flexible box. This became so common that the question of whether or not rounded corners were significant enough to be added in CSS answered itself - people are trying hard to hack the support in, so it's clearly something they want, and thus it's worthwhile to spec a method (the border-radius property) to give them it. It solves a problem that authors, through their actions, made extremely clear, and it does so in a way that is enormously simpler 99% of the time. Win-win.) ~Tj
