prefixes vs full URIs, Re: Working Group Decision on ISSUE-120 rdfa-prefixes

On 08.04.2011 18:14, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 5:48 AM, Sam Ruby<rubys@intertwingly.net>  wrote:
>> I ask you to give us a few days to evaluate the request that you have made.
>>   Meanwhile I am willing to state that the fact that you "thought that was
>> the reason for *URIs*, not prefixes" does not meet that bar.
>
> Kurt's statement was strictly incorrect, though; jgraham's correction
> aids in keeping the discussion focused on the matter at hand, which is
> precisely what to do with prefixes.  If someone believe that
> *prefixes* are the mechanism by which you disambiguate mixed languages
> (rather than one possible solution to the problem of "using URIs to
> disambiguate mixed languages makes hand-authoring hard"), you'll draw
> incorrect conclusions.  Jgraham correctly pointed out one such
> confusion: that it's okay for prefixes to be complex, because machines
> will usually be the ones who author them.  Machines don't have the
> problem that prefixes attempt to solve, so we shouldn't worry about
> them as a class of producers - prefixes, if they are kept, must solely
> be optimized for human hand-authoring, as that was their original (and
> currently unchanged) purpose.
> ...

Hm, not entirely.

Prefix-based indirection *also* can reduce the size of the generated 
HTML, and make it more readable (for human users; think "view source").

Whether that's important is a separate issue.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Friday, 8 April 2011 16:38:21 UTC