Re: Why bound prefixes are an anti-pattern in language design

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Aug 2009, Danny Ayers wrote:
>   
>> 2009/8/7 Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>:
>>     
>>> Microdata (in HTML5) has unambiguity and consistency without 
>>> sacrificing the ease of use, at least not from the use of prefix 
>>> binding mechanisms.
>>>       
>> I honestly hope you are right - but the evidence I've seen so far 
>> suggests microdata is a cargo cult rendition of RDF.
>>     

Indeed!

> Could you elaborate on that? 
Three things one must do to avoid becoming a Cargo Cult scientist...

1, " researchers must first of all avoid fooling themselves"

   Reverse DNS Identifiers[1], They are just backwards urls right![2]  I 
cant think of a single advantage over regular url's unless you think 
authors don't understand a them?

   [1] 
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#valid-reversed-dns-identifier
   [2] 
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#selecting-names-when-defining-vocabularies
  
2, "be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own 
results"

   'Prefixes are an anti-pattern and notoriously hard for authors to 
understand' [3]  .
   'I have to admit to not really sharing your optimism that the future 
of  the Web involves HTML authors describing things in machine-readable 
ways' [4]  ( I nearly fell of my chair when I read that )

  [3] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Aug/0035.html
  [4] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Aug/0062.html

  Ian you *have* seen this ? : 
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html Its 
probably a good a place to start If you somehow missed how important 
linked data is?

3, "investigate possible flaws in a theory "

  The whole of your design concept (linking machine data together 
causing a long string "foo.example.directory.page#" ) was discussed in 
depth over on Microformats New around two and  a half years ago[3] but 
if you had talked to somebody about your "Idea" maybe someone could have 
stopped you from wasting your time, in short It was generally thought of 
as a bad Idea.

   [3] 
http://www.mail-archive.com/microformats-new@microformats.org/msg00391.html

> If there are specific concerns I could allay, 
> either by addressing them in the specification or by some other means, I 
> would be more than happy to do so.
>   

Danny is ever so cryptic..


Best wishes

-- 
Martin McEvoy
http://weborganics.co.uk/

Received on Saturday, 8 August 2009 02:06:06 UTC