Re: [whatwg] Creative Commons Rights Expression Language

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008, Ben Adida wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Sun, 24 Aug 2008, Dan Brickley wrote:
> >> I'm sure a small group of these could be assembled to discuss an 
> >> RDFa-for-HTML5 proposal, should one be made.
> > 
> > I would be very interested in taking part in such discussions. I would 
> > in particular like to see discussion of:
> > 
> >  * What the problem being addressed is.
> > 
> >  * What research shows that it is an important enough problem that it 
> >    should be addressed.
> > 
> >  * What the requirements are.
> 
> Can you point to examples of this process for other features that have 
> been added? Say, for example, what is the research that shows that a SQL 
> database within the browser is really needed and is important enough 
> "for the bulk of users"?

The Database stuff was mostly driven by requests from large Web 
application authors (including, for example, GMail), who wanted to be able 
to offer their services even while their users were offline. Webmail is a 
very widely used service with literally hundreds of millions of active 
users, so showing that it affected the bulk of users wasn't hard. The 
process followed by the database API proposals after it was established 
that it was something worth persuing was the one described in the FAQ:

   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_the_spec.3F

The implementor who worked on an experimental version was the Gears team, 
an open source project that provides extensions to browsers for new 
features. After they demonstrated viability, with a number of projects 
written to use their features, another browser vendor (Apple) indicated a 
desire to implement the feature, and only then (using the experience 
brought to the table by the Gears team) was an API written up and added to 
the spec.


> > As you say, I don't think we have a shared vision here. In particular, 
> > there have been several alusions to concepts that I do not understand 
> > at all, like computers fetching information about vocabularies and 
> > doing something useful with that information.
> 
> So, I'm not saying ccREL answers *all* of your questions there, but it 
> certainly does answer a number of them, especially with respect to 
> vocabulary modularity, extensibility, and evolution, with machines 
> reading these vocabularies and making some sense of them.
>
> ccREL will also point you to other documents that explain this in
> greater detail, including the RDF Primer.

It would really be helpful if you could just provide a direct answer 
instead of pointing at a 27 page document and a 66 page document, 
especially when those documents aren't even really directly answering the 
question.

Consider it from our side. How would you feel if you asked a question and 
I told you the answer was somewhere in the HTML5 spec?


> Are we only trying to solve problems that the *bulk* of users know they 
> have? What about enabling new solutions that will provide a new category 
> of solutions that the bulk of users can't quite put their finger on? 
> That a number of publishers can see would be super useful...
> 
> Also, what does "bulk" mean, more precisely?

We have to address problems that people know they have, or would agree 
they have if told they had them, because people won't spend any effort to 
address problems they don't think they have.


> > So far, I have not felt like we have an agreement on what the problems 
> > we should be solving are, which makes it hard to discuss proposals.
> 
> I'm confused: the ccREL paper lists *exactly* the problems that CC is 
> facing, and they are quite similar to those of other promoters of RDFa.

The word "problem" doesn't appear once in the ccREL paper. Where is the 
statement of what ccREL is trying to solve?

But I'm more concerned about RDFa, since presumably if we addressed the 
problems of RDFa, ccREL would be automatically resolved.


> Is the ccREL paper not clear? Do you disagree with it? Please tell me 
> more.

The ccREL paper is long, wordy, and doesn't really seem to clearly state 
the answers to the questions I listed above. I'm really just looking for a 
simple one-page answer.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 24 August 2008 22:39:41 UTC