Official Response to ISSUE-129 from RDF Web Apps WG

Hi Niklas,

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 Last Call issue
before we enter the Candidate Recommendation phase for the RDFa 1.1
specifications.

Your issue was tracked here:

https://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/129

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

You were concerned that the specification text made it seem as if the
Working Group had intended for the terms defined in an initial context
to never be overridden, even by @vocab. Your primary concern is that you
did not want authors to second guess which terms were overridden and
which ones were not based on the Host Language. This would lead to
author confusion and eventually a mistrust that the terms they thought
they were using, via @vocab, end up resolving to terms in the default
context instead of terms in the vocabulary specified by @vocab.

You had proposed a simple change to the RDFa Core processing rules as a
result:

"""
The essence of the proposal change the rules in 7.4.3 to:

[[[
* If there is a local default vocabulary, the IRI is obtained by
concatenating that value and the term.
* Otherwise, check if the term matches an item in the list of local
term mappings. First compare against the list case-sensitively, and if
there is no match then compare case-insensitively. If there is a
match, use the associated IRI.
* Otherwise, the term has no associated IRI and must be ignored.
]]]
"""

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

It was not the intent of the Working Group, when it created the @vocab
attribute, to allow terms defined in the initial context to override the
@vocab attribute. Therefore, the group agreed with your viewpoint that
@vocab should override all terms specified in the initial context.

RESOLVED: @vocab nukes everything (that is, when @vocab is used, it
overrides all terms defined in the initial context) (non-substantive)

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2012-02-23#resolution_7

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)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm Website for Developers Launched
http://digitalbazaar.com/2012/02/22/new-payswarm-alpha/

Received on Sunday, 26 February 2012 20:45:36 UTC