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cc-devel - Re: [cc-devel] Malformed HTML in CC licences

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Subject: Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

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  • From: Richard Smith <richard AT ex-parrot.com>
  • To: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] Malformed HTML in CC licences
  • Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:52:50 +0000 (GMT)


Unfortunately simply adding the DOCTYPE declaration for XHTML+RDFa isn't sufficient to make it validate. The document contains namespace declarations like

xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#";

which are not valid per the DTD. Admitedly some validators choose not to give warnings about this particular problem. But technically, so far as XML 1.0 or 1.1 DTD validation is concerned, the ':' is just another character, and the 'xmlns:cc' attribute is not declared in the DTD and so is not permitted. Higher-level technologies know that 'xmlns:cc' isn't an attribute at all but is a namespace declaration, but unfortunately DTD validation knows nothing of XML namespaces.

All that said, I'm all for using the XHTML+RDFa DOCTYPE declaration on these documents. It may not make the document validate, but it will perhaps help parsers realise there's RDFa there to find.

Technically it is possible to me the documents validate, either by using the RDFa 1.1 'prefix' attributes in place of namespace declarations, or by using alternative constructs that allow the use of a URI instead of a QName like 'cc:permits'. But my experience is that these have rather poor support, and I personally would avoid these techniques.

Richard




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