Re: ISSUE-26: RDFa-specific vs. Earl-like Processor Status vocabulary

On 07/07/10 11:19, Manu Sporny wrote:
> A new section was added over this past weekend to outline how an RDFa
> 1.1 Processor will handle processor warnings and errors:
> 
> If you have an opinion on way or the other, please make it known on this
> mailing list. Ivan will author a vocabulary as soon as consensus is clear.

*chair hat off*

-1 to the EARL-based mechanism.
+1 to the simpler, RDFa-specific vocabulary.

I had to implement EARL reporting when we did the RDFa Test suite:

  * It was fairly heavy-weight and unwieldy.
  * While one can view RDFa Processing as a way of "testing" the
    web page, it's a stretch and isn't intuitive to think of
    your web browser "testing" pages as you browse the web.
  * I agree that we should re-use vocabularies if they exist,
    and in this case, a "Language Processor" vocabulary would
    fit the bill. Unfortunately, there isn't one AFAIK.
  * We already need to extend the vocabulary independently of EARL,
    so we already need RDFa-specific vocabulary terms for
    information, warning and error reporting. So, even if we do
    adopt EARL, we end up creating an RDFa error reporting language
    anyway.

The strongest objection I have to re-using EARL is that it isn't clear
to me that the semantics in the vocabulary, nor the purpose of the
vocabulary, was meant to be used as an error reporting language for
language processors.

EARL was primarily designed for testing and quality assurance processes.
That is, it assumes a typical Test Plan/Test Specification/Text
Execution/Test Reporting and Report merging environment. It's very
heavy-weight and we don't do half of what EARL expects in the RDFa
Processor. We could shoe-horn it in there, but I'd rather that we spend
the time to get a small, compact set of terms that we can extend easily
written for RDFa Processors. We can always generalize later, however,
starting off by generalizing to EARL would be going too far.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Myth Busting Web Stacks - PHP is Faster Than You Think
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2010/06/12/myth-busting-php/2/

Received on Wednesday, 7 July 2010 15:35:57 UTC