Re: an issue with prefix-less curies (also comment on the syntax document)

Niklas,

> Mostly thinking out loud here; I hope I'm not confusing things.
>
> I wonder -- since this is in fact the introduction of a new set of
> URIs for the unprefixed names in @rel -- would there be any merit in
> distinguish it a bit more from the (namespace) URI of the xhtml
> doctype? Like:
>
>     <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/relations#>

I agree 110%. :)

We did a similar thing in XHTML M12N with the datatypes [1]. They used
to be in the normal XHTML namespace, but we gave them the following
mapping instead:

  <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/datatypes/>

We did this because essentially, the definition of a datatype like
'Length'--defined as a non-negative integer--will almost certainly be
unchanged in any future version of XHTML. So in M12N it is defined
with the following URI:

  <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/datatypes/Length>

Of course future versions of XHTML may not use different XHTML
namespaces, in which case no problem would have arisen, but by
isolating the datatypes like this we protect ourselves and any
processors that make use of this information. We also allow anyone
defining a new language based on XHTML M12N to re-use these datatypes.


I think what you are saying, Niklas, is that we should consider doing
exactly the same thing for the relationships between documents, and I
would agree. There is a small tricky problem though, which is that
unlike the definition of non-negative integers, the list of
relationships may grow.

But this is actually only a problem for us over in XHTML-land, and not
something we need to worry about here. In XHTML-land we will need to
consider whether we should have different datatypes for xh11d:LinkType
(which is what currently defines the content of @rel and @rev). At the
moment the definition is just a list of tokens, but we might decide to
define this more tightly in future versions, and could therefore end
up with xh2d:LinkType, xh3d:LinkType, and so on.

But in RDFa-land all we need to know is what the appearance of one of
these link types _generates_, and for that we only need to agree on a
URI mapping. (Your suggestion seems as good as any. :))

This is easy to change in the syntax document, so it's not something
we have to resolve now--it might even be something we want to raise at
the Amsterdam face-to-face to see if others have any views.

Regards,

Mark

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/schema_module_defs.html#a_module_XHTML_Datatypes>

-- 
  Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer

  mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
  http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com

  standards. innovation.

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2007 10:39:42 UTC