SWBPD HTML TF

[Ben and Ralph talk about microformats while waiting for others]

IPTC Meeting Notes

Mark: I met again today with IPTC, followup from Friday meeting; they're keen to progress further
... Friday meeting was very positive
... Misha focussed the discussion on his document first, then we dived into details
... IPTC wants a small set of relationships between data
... they want to make statements about the relationships between other tags
... reification is a big issue for them; they want to give [provenance] -- who assigned a 'tag', with what confidence, etc.
... they're very open to RDF/A, as long as they get a compact syntax
... in their proposed syntax there is a lot of level-mixing
... e.g. attributes whose subject is a statement and other attributes whose subject is something else
... they admitted this could get confusing to people
... this can help us, as it's a real meaty application; I felt very positive about this
... they have a tight timescale; their next meeting is in October and they need to publish documents beforehand, thus 3 Oct is their deadline

Ben: how will they do RDF/A without XHTML2?

Mark: they have several languages;
... one is comparable to XHTML2; it marks up a news story
... they're not completely convinced that XHTML2 gives them everything they need
... they have a suite of other languages; e.g. SportsML that sit on their base language
... then they have another layer that provides alternative formats for a document
... a wrapper describes the 'package' of formats available
... document format to wrap other documents
... another format: many documents that make up a news story
... 3 document formats. XHTML2 might replace the bottom one, but not others.
... RDF/A was designed as general purpose attribute syntax

Ben: can RDF/A be added to XHTML1

Mark: there's been discussion about this.
... there are ways to mark up DanBri's examples using XHTML1

Ben: very interesting to think about this issue. Could it be accomplished with XHTML1 that renders correctly in the browser?

Mark: property is not an XHTML1 attribute, but it could be added as a module.

Ben: how is XHTML1 modularization going to interact with validators?

Mark: there are probably no XHTML 1.1 validators, because there is no schema yet
... XHTML 1.1 will have modularization, in order to replace XHTML 1.0.
... DTDs for XHTML 1.0 will be replaced by XHTML 1.1 schemas
... tried using XHTML 1.1 architecture to combine multiple modules and add XForms. It didn't work.
... Xforms is a bit more complicated of a use case.
... currently tidying up XHTML 1.1 modularization. Later XHTML2 using same techniques.

Ben: keep us posted on this; it might help for adoption

Mark: tricky thing is QNAME issue for predicates.
... could argue that there's nothing to stop you using Qnames in REL.
... same as "DC.creator"

Ben: what's the current direction on qnames everywhere?

Mark: would be great to have qnames and URIs interchangeable. square brackets won't fly either.
... need to add qabout and qhref
... or qcontent

Ben: in terms of consistency, if we add qabout and qhref do we also need qrel?

Mark: yes
... [even though] it would be painful for every attribute to have a q-version

Ben: if we do settle on the qabout, qhref direction then adding qrel would settle the problem

Mark: and existing rel would be a kind of local identifier
... this could provide a neat answer to the backwards compatibility issue
... might also be solvable by putting constraints on the namespace prefixes; e.g. insist that the namespace prefixes used within a document not match [known] URI schemes
... it will become common to sprinkle qnames throughout HTML documents in the future
... if we do choose the q-attribute route, I prefer 'qcontent' and leave 'href' alone

Ben: any other issues from IPTC discussion?

Mark: we need to settle our view on reification
... we've revised the interpretation of ID so many times in this design
... though I quite like the idea that ID refers to the _statement_
... IPTC does want to be able to say _who_ made a statement, _when_ the statement was made, how confident they are of the statement, etc.

Ben: did custom attributes come up?

Mark: sort of, but I described it as solved
... but there is a desire to treat, for example, role= as identifying a property/value pair
... other things like media-type would benefit from such an approach as well
... IPTC's requirement is for compactness
... they don't like 'property=x content=y' on every element
... They've also defined elements ala 'dc:subject' with attributes
... very RDF-like
... they also have the problem of Schema validation

Ben: it would be good to summarize our current thinking on these 3 issues in an email

Mark: we could use DanBri's samples to help this discussion
... I've already noticed some possible improvements after trying to write DanBri's examples
... IPTC has also promised some examples, including some very big cases
... to help us understand the compactness issue

ACTION: Ben create a way to track progress on the 3 issues of qnames, reification, and custom attributes and elements [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2005/07/12-swbp-minutes.html#action01]

Ralph: would Misha be interested in formally joining the WG?

Mark: perhaps. They're certainly willing to attend some TF telecons.
... but they probably won't want to attend every meeting
... there may be applications that want to do metadata extraction by traversing an infoset via DOM