Re: Normative vs Informative

On 27 Nov 2011, at 11:46, Dominik Tomaszuk wrote:

> On 27.11.2011 03:14, Henry Story wrote:
>> Great idea. Let's start with a wiki.
>> Open one page: Formats, and have it point to an example page in every other format
>> you can think of - so that each format can get the attention it deserves.
>> 
>> Here I wrote up the initial page:
>> 
>>    http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/wiki/Formats
> OK, but first I think we should discuss in mail list. For example I disagree that json-ld is important now to WebID. I'm very big fun of JSON-LD, but now it's community draft and we have RDF/JSON draft [1] from RDF WG.
> So wiki isn't good way to do it, because quickly turns out that we have hundreds of formats in wiki.

I don’t think having lots of example serialisations and related guidance is a problem by any means — quite the opposite.

However, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the WebID spec should mandate RDF/XML and only RDF/XML (with either conneg or <link>) for the time being.

The rationale is that RDF/XML is the one serialisation — at present — guaranteed to be supported by RDF consumers, and that RDFa still has some way to go yet before it’s properly reconciled with the HTML5 parsing work. Until it is, any notion of error-handling (vitally important in real web pages) is going to be largely undefined.

What I’d like to see is the RDFa spec build upon the HTML5 parsing rules, so that there’s clarity and consistency in how to deal with RDFa sprinkled into real-world “tag soup” pages, and for validation and other consuming tools to fall into line — AFAIK this hasn’t happened *yet*, and until it does I don’t think RDFa belongs as a MUST for WebID consumers in the spec as it is now.

(Side-note: JSON-LD and RDF/JSON solve different classes of problem; they’re not competing specifications, they’re just two JSON-based serialisations of RDF).

M.

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Received on Sunday, 27 November 2011 13:38:57 UTC