Dublin Core in HTML5
Internet
The Dublin Core schema is a set of vocabulary terms that can be used to add metadata to documents. It predates schema.org, and is widely used in RSS, publishing, and academia.
I was adding Dublin Core metadata to an HTML5 page, and encountered a couple of problems with the W3C’s nu validator.
“schema.DC not a registered keyword”
My pages included the following links which I’ve been using since the XHTML days:
<link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" />
<link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" />
But the nu validator claimed it had a “bad value schema.DC for attribute rel on element link: The string schema.DC is not a registered keyword.” This seems like a glaring oversight or omission given the importance of Dublin Core.
There are two options here. You can remove the links to schema.DC and schema.DCTERMS, because their vocabularies are already known to HTML5. I prefer to codify what I’m using, so the other option is adding vocab prefixes:
<head prefix="dc: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1
dcterms: http://purl.org/dc/terms">
Then referencing Dublin Core metadata using HTML5’s built-in RDFa property attribute:
<meta property="dc:title" content="The Bird is the Word" />
“The scheme attribute on the meta element is obsolete”
This validator error also took me by surprise. One could previously define the scheme of an attribute, like a data type:
<meta name="DC.date" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF" content="..." />
<meta name="DC.identifier" scheme="DCTERMS.URI" content="..."
<meta name="DC.format" scheme="DCTERMS.IMT" content="..." />
<meta name="DC.language" scheme="DCTERMS.RFC1766" content="..." />
<meta name="DC.rights" scheme="DCTERMS.URI" content="..." />
This was removed in HTML5, with the unhelpful comment that the “scheme attribute on the meta element is obsolete. Use only one scheme per field, or make the scheme declaration part of the value.”
I’m confused. This is using one scheme per field. And how does one include the scheme declaration as part of the value?
This forum poster suggested there wasn’t anything to worry about because “parsers do a pretty good job”. Bluntly, this is insufficient, especially given we could unambiguously express the type before.
If it weren’t for the beautiful srcset attribute, I’d probably still be doing things in XHTML+RDFa land. The run fast and break things approach to HTML5 still worries me a bit. Se a vida é.
