The RDDL challenge

At the TAG's recent face-to-face meeting, we invested quite a bit of 
time in the issues surrounding "namespace documents" in general and RDDL 
in particular.  RDDL as currently proposed (http://www.rddl.org/) is 
based on XLink and is easy enough to understand, but it is reasonable to 
explore altrnatives.  Rather than argue in the abstract, we decided to 
look at concrete suggestions, and I took an action item to launch this 
debate.

Scope: We assume that a RDDL document is XHTML with embedded 
machine-readable information that allows related resources to be looked 
up based on metadata fields, most important the resources' "nature" 
(namespace name or MIME type) and "purpose" (what you're going to be 
using it for, e.g. validation, rendering).

Here's the example.  There's a namespace whose name is 
"http://example.com/L".  It has a RelaxNG schema at 
"http://example.com/schemas/L.rng" with nature 
"http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0" and purpose 
"http://www.rddl.org/purposes#validation".  It has a CSS stylesheet at 
"http://example.org/style/L.css" with nature 
"http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/css" and 
purpose "http://www.rddl.org/purposes#render".

Please propose examples of how you think this information ought to be 
embedded in a RDDL instance, in a message to www-tag with the title 
"RDDL proposal from <your name here>".  The proposals should include:

- the syntax
- the embedding mechanism (in a new element, in the header or body, 
whatever)
- what you consider the pros and cons of your approach

Sooner is better.

Cheers, Tim Bray

Received on Saturday, 23 November 2002 13:14:09 UTC