RDFa attributes in XForms [was Re: Draft minutes for 2009-03-11]

Hello all,

(CCing the RDFa list for their interest, since some people may not be
aware that there is interest in the XForms community in ensuring that
XForms and RDFa play nicely together.)


> Steven Pemberton: And there was the resource attribute; we wish we'd done
> the thinking for RDFa. It's an attribute we introduced in XForms as a
> consistency with the child element; it's functionality is the same as src,
> if I'm not mistaken.

We did do the thinking. :)

When someone suggested @resource on submission we debated whether it
would clash with RDFa, and I said it wouldn't at the semantic level.
Shane said it would clash at the DTD/schema level, but said that he
could probably work around that.


> John Boyer: Same a @action
> Steven Pemberton: So one option would be for us in XForms 1.1 to XHTML 2 to
> say that you have to use action, not resource.
> John Boyer: What is the meaning of the resource attribute from RDF?
> Steven Pemberton: RDFa. It specifies the object of a relation. It's similar
> to href but it's not the intention that it's clickable. It specifies a URI
> that's part of a relationship.

Right...although to clarify, we don't define *any* behaviour in RDFa.
If a browser wanted to make it clickable that would be up to them,
i.e., we don't say 'this attribute must never be clickable', because
we have no right to.


> Leigh Klotz: Didn't Mark say that resource was what the submission was about
> anyway?

Yes. See below.

> Or are you saying that since @resource is what makes it "clickable"
> it's not OK?
> Steven Pemberton: I see. I thnk it's ok to use @resource then.
> John Boyer: We also have it on the load action. It's not exactly UI
> clickable but it's like submission; you click something that invokes it. For
> instance you might say it's implicitly clicked.
> Steven Pemberton: Since they both have the same datatype, the problems are
> much less.

Right. The key thing is that the semantic aspect of RDFa is meant to
reflect real live data in a document, by which I mean that you should
be able to reuse markup that you would ordinarily have put into your
document anyway, in a semantic way.

So with RDFa you can 'reuse' inline text:

  <span property="dcterms:title">My great American novel</span>

you can 'reuse' a navigable link that you have made with another document:

  <a rel="license" href="cc.html">click here for the license</a>

and you can 'reuse' a link that you have made with an embedded document:

  <img src="my-photo.png" rel="license" resource="cc.html" />

All we're doing with XForms is saying that you can 'reuse' @resource
too. So if an author creates this:

  <xf:load resource="next-page.html" />

then they have in effect established a relationship between their form
and another document. All RDFa brings to the table is that they can
'reuse' this resource referred to, and be more precise about what
exactly the nature of the relationship is; so an author could add
@rel, like this:

  <xf:load rel="next" resource="next-page.html" />

Now an RDFa parser would 'spot' this relationship, and correctly decode it.

Regards,

Mark

-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
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Received on Wednesday, 11 March 2009 21:15:14 UTC