- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:01:55 -0500
- To: RDFa mailing list <public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>
- CC: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
Discussion with Henri Sivonen ----------------------------- Henri had two major disagreements with RDFa as it stands right now. CURIEs ------ Henri stated that the use of xmlns: will break the DOM Consistency Principle between XHTML and HTML. I let him know about @prefix, which would address the DOM Consistency Principle issue, but would still not be good enough in his mind. He is most concerned with HTML authors cutting and pasting snippets of RDFa that they believe to contain triples, but when pasted, fail to generate any because the prefix mappings were declared at the top of a page. He was also concerned that authors would get frustrated when their cut/paste RDFa did not produce the same triples that they saw on website X... or worse, they wouldn't check it and would see no benefit by embedding RDFa in their website. To address this issue, he (and Dan Brickley) believe that allowing @typeof, @property, @datatype and @rel/@rev to accept URIs would address this issue with the people in WHATWG that don't like CURIEs. They believe CURIEs are too fragile as implemented and it would be better to specify all URIs fully instead of providing a prefixing mechanism. Non-expert usage and RDFa Education ----------------------------------- Education about RDFa would also be an issue with the majority of web authors who don't care about web semantics and just want to get their page operational. He was concerned that authors who once used rel="license" are now being asked to embed more complex metadata (such as Creative Commons licenses) without truly grasping the subtleties of doing so (attaching them to the wrong subject). This is an issue because bad semantic markup doesn't generate the same sort of jarring page display issue that bad HTML markup does. The problem is with less-than-guru web authors who don't necessarily care about web semantics and thus generate bad semantic data out of ignorance. The common mis-use of @rev was cited as one possible outcome - mis-used so badly that it is commonly not trusted by search engines. Vocabulary Scalability ---------------------- He also did not believe in follow-your-nose to be a very useful concept and noted that even if we continue down the @prefix and Microformats-like RDFa markup routes, with special tokens/reserved words specified in a separate file, it could cause a scalability issue when vocabularies find themselves quite popular. The example of the W3C serving up many, many gigabytes of the same HTML4.01 DTD every day was cited as an example of what happens when your "vocabulary" becomes popular. He was concerned that by requiring parsers to load references from a remote file that one would either put the burden on web authors to stash those files on their web servers or put the burden on vocabulary authors to ensure that their vocabulary document can be transmitted millions of times a month. He cited that using something of the form of a pseudo-namespaced "foaf-foo" where each token was specified in a spec somewhere, but there was no way to follow your nose to it, or validate against it, would solve the "failure-due-to-popularity" issue. Henri was certainly sympathetic to embedding semantics in HTML for everyone that needed the functionality (not just the 80% that Microformats addresses) in HTML. He believes that removing CURIEs would go a long way towards addressing his concern with the way RDFa is currently implemented. -- manu -- Manu Sporny President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: Bitmunk 3.1 Website Launch http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/01/16/bitmunk-3-1-website-launch
Received on Tuesday, 20 January 2009 00:02:35 UTC