Why I don't like 'instanceof' (was Re: [RDFa] ISSUE-3: syntactic sugar for rdf:type)

I think there are only 3 reasons why I think 'instanceof' is a bad choice:

1. Multiword, which I already spoke of.
2. instance has another meaning in some existing and future XHTML  
documents.
3. It comes over as rdf-speak. Up to now we have done our best to avoid  
exposing RDF terminology to the XHTML author; no subject, predicate,  
object and so on, just existing HTML concepts where possible.  
Unfortuantely, most of the synonyms have already been taken (class, type,  
role), but I still think we should try and find something that reads  
better than 'instanceof' or 'isa'.

/me runs a thesaurus

sort
kind
category
realm

depict
portray
represent
embody

like

Steven

On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:25:48 +0200, Ben Adida <ben@adida.net> wrote:

>
>
> Hi all,
>
> In today's telecon, we proposed and resolved to use a *new* attribute,
> rather than @class or @role, for the rdf:type syntactic sugar. Thus,
> @class and @role do not currently result in any triples being generated,
> although one may consider that they will in a future version.
>
> The question, then, is which attribute to use. Steven expressed
> reservations about two-word attributes like "isa" or "instanceof", and
> instead proposed: denotes, depicts, represents, category, ilk, kind.
>
> Other thoughts?
>
> I'm partial to "instanceof" and "kind", and I have no additional
> suggestions.
>
> -Ben
>