Re: CURIE objections in HTML5+RDFa

On Feb 20, 2009, at 07:49, Manu Sporny wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Which alternative solution to ccREL are you referring to?

A hypothetical alternative that isn't being developed because the  
effort is put into ccREL in RDF.

>>> Could you provide at least one alternate mechanism? The mechanism  
>>> should
>>> not use full URIs, and should addresses most, if not all, of the
>>> problems solved by using full URIs?
>>
>> A backwards-incompatible alternative mechanism would be tokens of the
>> type "prefix-local" (or "prefix:local", but I'm trying to avoid
>> confusion here) where prefix *wouldn't map to anything*. That is,
>> processing would merely compare the "prefix-local" code point for  
>> code
>> point without expanding it to anything. Prefixes would be from two to
>> four letters--preferably acronyms for the vocabularies--
>
> Why are we imposing arbitrary limits on prefix-names? For example, we
> (Digital Bazaar and the Microformats community) have created an Audio
> RDF vocabulary, and we would like people to use "audio" for the prefix
> in RDFa. Granted, we can't /make/ them do that, but do make a
> best-practice suggestion that they spell it out so it's easier to read
> the HTML code, for those that care about such things.

My point was that short prefixes provide enough space in practice. I  
didn't mean to impose an arbitrary limit to vocabulary designers who  
want a longer prefix.

>> a one-letter URI scheme
>> (e.g. 'r' for RDF) could be registered adding two characters of  
>> overhead
>> per predicate: "r:prefix-local".
>> To add back dereferencability in pre-existing software and to use a
>> pre-existing registry system, a TLD called 'rdf' could be  
>> registered and
>> the identifiers could take the form "http://local.prefix.rdf" with 11
>> characters of overhead. If a software update for dereferencability is
>> OK, "r:prefix-local" could be defined as the identifier to compare,  
>> but
>> to dereference it you'd map it to "http://local.prefix.rdf" before
>> passing it to the HTTP layer.
>
> I thought your whole point was to get away from using URIs of any  
> sort?
> I'm a bit confused at this point, didn't you state that URIs were a  
> bad
> thing and we shouldn't use them at all?

Right.

However, as an elaboration, I outlined a way to make masquarade short  
strings as URIs to avoid disruptive changes to deployed RDF software.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2009 10:17:50 UTC