Please Don't Use the Name "@prefix" (was: an alternative for microformat-like simplicity)

Hi, folks-

Ben Adida wrote (on 7/16/09 1:03 PM):
>
> Here's my proposed alternative: use RDF/OWL for vocabulary mappings, and
> add to RDFa only the ability to declare a default prefix.
>
> Markup in the page:
>
> <div about="#me" prefix="http://myvocab.org/#">
>    My name is<span property="name">Ben Adida</span>

Sorry to bikeshed about this so early, but please reconsider the name 
for the attribute @prefix.  @prefix refers to the mechanism, not the 
conceptual relation, and is not intuitive.  RDFa should be designed for 
people coming from the HTML world, not from the RDF/SemWeb world.  If 
you want to give people a set of semantic attributes that will be easy 
for them to learn, understand, and remember, you should name the 
attributes according to their function, not their form.

I suggest @context or @scope something similar, because what the prefix 
does is to qualify a term according to a given resource, right?

I don't think most Web developers know the "namespace prefix" 
terminology, and without that jargon, @prefix could mean pretty much 
anything.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs

Received on Monday, 20 July 2009 00:36:46 UTC