Re: CURIE objections in HTML5+RDFa

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> Also, if RDFa turned out to be successful in text/html (with or without
> a blessing by the HTML 5 spec), we'd be left with syntactic complexity
> in the platform. In particular, if RDFa succeeds for a couple of use
> cases and fails in general (or succeeds otherwise in far down the long
> tail of use cases), the important use cases would be stuck with complex
> syntax.
> 
> I'm particularly worried about ccREL succeeding to the point that an
> alternative solution can no longer be launched into the market to
> replace it and Free Culture then getting encumbered by the syntactic
> complexity preventing even further success.

Your initial concerns were:
a) indirection is too hard for most users, and
b) URIs are bad architecturally

If RDFa and ccREL are successful, doesn't that imply that your initial
concerns, both (a) and (b), were wrong? If either (a) or (b) were true,
 widespread success would be unattainable.

And given that your proposed changes are less extensible (central
registry of prefixes vs de-reference-able URIs/CURIEs) and no more
expressive (URIs vs CURIEs), how is your approach any better given that
ours is hypothetically already simple enough to be successful?

Put more succinctly: if our proposal becomes popular, then that means
it's working for most users, and if it's working for most users, then
how can it be too cumbersome?

-Ben

Received on Friday, 20 February 2009 02:40:17 UTC