Re: attempting to merge the 'vocab' and 'profile' documents

On 3/9/10 1:01 AM, Ivan Herman wrote:
> If we forget about the 'how we do it' for a moment, I think having a
> mechanism to put the zillions of xmlns: statement into one place and
> replacing it with one reference is important.

I disagree, because

(1) there are hardly going to be zillions of xmlns statements,

(2) if you're simplifying the author's life but leaving prefixes in 
there, the author still needs to be acutely aware of the idea of 
combining vocabularies, scoping terms, etc... so I think we're not 
really making the average author's life any easier.

(3) the major use case to tackle, I think, is Google's, where they 
basically redefined a vocabulary and made the prefix as unintrusive as 
possible: 'v'. I suspect they'd rather get rid of the prefix altogether.

> Would we require the vocabulary publishers to publish
> separate RDFa vocabulary files to publish separate keywords URI-s, too,
> beyond the RDF files they already publish? This simply does not scale
> for vocabularies that may hundred or more terms...

I don't understand what you mean. If, as a publisher, I want to use 5 
terms from DC, 3 terms from FOAF, and 2 terms from CC, I would put 
together a vocab with keywords that point to those 10 terms, and use 
those keywords. That's a little bit more work up front to pinpoint the 
terms I want to use, but it's a lot less work in each actual HTML file, 
which is exactly the trade-off we want, right? We want some people 
defining easy-to-reuse vocabs, and many people just using them.

Putting it another way: a mechanism that lets you bulk declare prefixes 
does nothing to simplify the author's required understanding of RDFa, 
it's just a syntactic sugar for many @xmlns's. I think that buys us very 
little. On the other hand, a mechanism to let you define your own 
keywords means *significantly* less stuff to understand for the user of 
that vocabulary, so that certainly fulfills the goal of simplifying 
authoring work.

-Ben

Received on Tuesday, 9 March 2010 17:12:38 UTC