Official Response to ISSUE-108 from RDF Web Apps WG

Hi Jeni,

Thank you for your public feedback on the RDFa 1.1 documents. This is an
official response from the RDF Web Apps WG to your issue before we enter
the 3rd Last Call for the RDFa 1.1 work this coming Tuesday. The Last
Call will last for 3 weeks, so there is still time for you to discuss
your concerns if we have not fully addressed them.

Your issue was tracked here:

ISSUE-108: Refine/deprecate Link relations for the RDFa 1.1 Default Profile.
https://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/108

Explanation of Issue
--------------------

In your blog post, you pointed out that spurious triples of link
relations could be created in RDFa in HTML5:

http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/165

You specifically said:

"""
It doesn’t seem semantically correct to automatically create
relationships based on the built-in HTML rel values, unless you are
deliberately trying to extract document semantics from the page. This is
a problem for RDFa, which reuses the rel attribute to provide property
values for the embedded data.

One thing that could be done would be for RDFa to consistently use the
property attribute everywhere rather than the rel attribute. This would
not only ease the overloading but also reduce the confusion for users,
who currently have to work out which attribute to use based on whether
the value is a resource or a literal.
"""

Working Group Decision
----------------------

The problem was a bit deeper and it became apparent that if RDFa Core
1.1 is to generate triples in HTML5, that it should do one of two
things. Either RDFa processors should generate the correct triples,
requiring processors to understand HTML5 in more detail and thus greatly
increasing the complexity of an RDFa Processor, or RDFa processors
should not generate triples for values like rel="next" in HTML5, but
should ensure backwards-compatability in XHTML1 by continuing to
generate those triples. The full discussion can be seen here:

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2011-12-01#ISSUE__2d_108__3a__Refine__2f_deprecate_Link_relations

In the end, we felt that not generating triples for terms like "next"
and "index" in HTML5 would be best.

RESOLVED: RDFa 1.1 will have 3 default profiles, RDFa Core 1.1 will
contain the terms 'describedby', 'license', and 'role', HTML+RDFa will
not have any terms, XHTML+RDFa will have all terms required for
backwards compatability.

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2011-12-01#resolution_4

Feedback
--------

Since this is an official Working Group response to your issue, we would
appreciate it if you responded to this e-mail and let us know if the
decision made by the group is acceptable to you as soon as possible.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm vs. OpenTransact Shootout
http://manu.sporny.org/2011/web-payments-comparison/

Received on Saturday, 28 January 2012 17:54:27 UTC