What happened with meta name and rel attributes DC., XFN, ICBM, GEO…?

I’ve spent some time this weekend trying to find out why W3C HTML Validator marks most of the “rel” attributes in head and body, recommended by XFN, hCard, Dublin Core, ICBM and others, as non-valid for HTML5 built pages – since the last week. Some of them are very established in HTML4, some of them are non-normative recommendations, but anyway in widespread use. Now, not even the Google-supported <link rel="canonical" validates anymore!

Commented today by Henri Sivonen [ hsivonen(AT)iki•fi ] @lists.whatwg.org:

The reason why they don’t validate is that at the time of the latest validator code change and deployment, those keywords weren’t registered in the rel keyword extension registry. HTML5 has limited the validity of rel keywords for a long, long time, but this was implemented in the validator only recently.
Only the implementation makes people care about the registry, so we didn’t quite get a running start. Furthermore, the W3C HTML WG decided to move the registry to a different venue, which had the effect of resetting the registration efforts, since the old registry and the new one have different licenses, so the old one couldn’t be copied and pasted over wholesale.
XFN and rel=canonical now validate at html5.validator.nu because they have been registered. It may take a while until validator.w3.org gets redeployed.

I’ve found out about the deprecated “profile” tag, and replaced it by “prefetch” in the head (which I guess only works in FF), and added <a rel="profile" href=http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 to the bottom, as recommended by Tantek Çelik – but this doesn’t seem to be “official”, either. A big downer, as I always tried to keep my sites 100% valid, additionally I won’t quit using the popular and useful semantic elements.

Comment by Henri Sivonen: profile is not relevant here.

Hard to take: HTML5 and Microformats are in the same way supported by the same group of people. WordPress makes heavy use of both (what I really like and DoFollow), hence the default wp twentyten template will now receive about 80 errors in the validator, as well as (My Blog) since that day. This doesn’t seem to make much sense to me, as Matt Mullenweg (founder and hoster of WordPress) is also part of the W3C group. But if that’s the way it is … I really respect and salute any of them.

I didn’t find an appropriate workaround for XFN, ICBM, GEO. and DC., neither in the recently updated wp-twentyten nor in the extended article html5-metadata-and-dublin-core or as a response in the related post at Google.com/Supportforum/Webmasters.

And after reading more: w3.org/2010/WD-rdfa-core and more: microformats.org/xfn-implementations and even more, I’ve ended up at Tantek Çelik’s twitter updates, as he is one of the main players in this scenario. I’ve sent him a mail, mentioning my quotes from above, and the following:
If there’s a new kind of “Official Standards”-war happening between schema.org patrons and the Consortium … hoping this will be a passing muddle, as it means extra work for us who try to develop templates on a forward-thinking and valid level. Any hint / advice is very welcome.

Tantek Çelik‘s personal response:

In brief, we’re in a bit of a transition period in terms of figuring out how to best validate rel values in HTML5. That means for the moment (due only to technical/process details, not disagreements), many/most rel values stopped validating with HTML5. We’re working on fixing that with the rel-values registry at microformats.org – microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values – so that validators can pick-up the list of currently proposed/valid rel-values automatically.
Basically, validators are going to potentially errantly report rel values as invalid until that work has caught up – so the best thing is to consciously make a note that “unknown rel value” errors are “ok” for now. I wish I had a better answer, but such is the nature of HTML5 being in flux.
I hope that helps, and believe me, everyone of us wants to make all of this valid, and work properly for everyone. (oh and it has nothing to do with the current schema.org conflict – that’s a completely different problem).

I like the idea of having some kind of a library, regarding namespaces/protocols/tags in one place, thumbs up. You can help by registering stuff by following the links in the error messages that the validator shows you and editing the wikis with the information that the HTML(5) spec(s) require registrations to have. The registry changes aren’t reflected in real time. I suggest you give the W3C validator maintainer a week or so to redeploy after you’ve made registrations.

To be able to use the vCards offered on this and other pages, simply install one of the free-to-use hcard-implementations, e.g. the Firefox extension Operator (this extension is casual-user, advanced-user and developer friendly, very customizable and unobstrusive), or the IE extension Oomph (this Add-In to Internet Explorer will light up on pages with hCards).

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