Re: ISSUE-35 RDFinXHTML-35 (also ACTION-240)

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
> A couple of related observations:
>
> 1) The RDFa spec says:
>>
>> Note that it is generally considered a good idea not to use relative paths
>> in namespace declarations, but since it is possible that an author may
>> ignore this guidance, it is further possible that the URI obtained from a
>> CURIE is relative. However, since all URIs must be resolved relative to
>> [base] before being used to create triples, the use of relative paths should
>> not have any effect on processing.
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/#s_convertingcurietouri
>
> This seems to be in conflict with XML architecture where the values of
> xmlns:foo are opaque strings that are absolute URIs by convention.
>
> 2) The CURIE spec itself doesn't appear to define CURIE processing--just
> syntax.
>
> 3) OWL rejected CURIEs. The reasons are explained at
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/2009AprJun/0009.html

I'm going to note that instead of the problem being to keep RDFa or
not, why not view this as a chance to make RDFa easier to use and
possibly fix some of its relatively minor technical problems?

So, instead of saying "Let's reject CURIEs", what can constructively
can be done in the opinion of people from HTML5/WHATWG to fix CURIEs
so RDFa plays well with HTML5? Is there anything outside of CURIEs
that is found objectionable in RDFa?

Since RDFa as written was made for XHTML, like other specs (GRDDL
comes to mind, as does, more importnatly, ARIA) that were written for
XHTML, some small changes may be necessary. If this discussion has
already happened elsewhere (I imagine it has), and there has been some
consensus from non-RDFa techies about how to fix bits of RDFa to make
it better, I think this should be taken very seriously.

I just spent the last few days at a conference on information
retrieval with researchers from Yahoo!, and Yahoo! is producing
applications that consume RDFa, and now I'm seeing lots more sites
produce it, although not in XHTML, but in something resembling HTML5.
I think Yahoo! has stats on how users actually deploy it, and it would
be great if this could inform the discussion.

            cheers,
                 harry


> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen@iki.fi
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
>
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 21 April 2009 09:18:06 UTC