PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-44: Processing remote documents

If there are no objections to this proposal in 7 days, we will close
ISSUE-44: Add a mechanism to the RDFa API to parse remote documents and
place them into a DataStore.

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/44

This issue concerned the addition of a mechanism to the RDFa API in
order to load and process documents containing RDFa markup from external
sources. It would have required resolving a number of cross-site
scripting security concerns as well as declaring a general security
model for loading RDFa resources from external sources. However, the
group also noted that processing external RDFa documents was a vital
feature.

In the end, the RDFa WG found that changing the browser security model
to support a special set of rules for loading RDFa resources would
require far more time and expertise than the group had at present. The
group also found that by depending on the existing browser security
model that many of the use cases envisioned by remote RDFa processing
could be achieved. That is, any RDFa processor supporting remote RDFa
processing of documents should use the XMLHttpRequest object and
same-origin/CORS to retrieve the remote document.

The .parse() method exposed in the RDFa API has the following signature now:

boolean parse(in any toparse);

The toparse value can be a DOMNode or a DOMString. In the case of a
DOMString, the value is assumed to be an external document and is
fetched using any method that follows the standard browser security
model (XMLHttpRequest + CORS). The method returns true if the parse was
successful and false otherwise. The data extracted from the toparse
argument can be queried using the standard .query() mechanism.

The proposal is to keep the change made to the current specification
based on the reasoning above.

Please comment in 7 days from this post if you object to this proposal.
If there are no objections within 7 days, ISSUE-44 will be closed.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Linked Data in JSON
http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/10/30/json-ld/

Received on Sunday, 2 January 2011 19:27:40 UTC