Re: Are we elements or animals? (was: Use of fragment identifiers in XML)

me@aaronsw.com (Aaron Swartz) writes:
>On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 06:27 PM, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>> While I'm not entirely sure how to interpret section 5, it certainly
>> makes it clear that typical XML fragment identifier approaches don't
>> apply directly to RDF in any useful way, at least any way that RDF
>> understands.  If you could expand that section in a future draft, I'd
>> appreciate it.
>
>It's been the subject of much debate; any suggestions on what to add?

Mostly I'm concerned because I can see the "do not treat these fragment
identifiers as XPointers" side, but it's not clear from the registration
how fragment identifiers for RDF are supposed to work, or indeed whether
that interpretation is something about RDF *processing* or RDF
*documents*.  To be honest, I don't know myself, though I've assumed
(which seems very wrong to me in this context) that it was a matter of
the processing.

>>> (The W3C serves *all* of its RDF documents with that mime type! All
>>> of TimBL's carefully RDF-specified ...w3.org...#dogs and ...#cats
>>> turn out to be elements, not animals.)
>> Would it be better or worse if they served the RDF documents as
>> image/png?
>
>A little of both; browsers would get really confused. At one point they 
>switched to application/rdf+xml but quickly switched back once they 
>discovered that Internet Explorer offered to download it instead of 
>display it as XML. If they want it displayed as XML, I'm not sure what 
>else they can use. text/plain perhaps?

That sounds like a more general malady afflicting how browsers use media
types.  It might be nice if IE's developers could fall back based on the
+xml, but given the general level of support for displaying XML in that
browser, I'm not holding my breath.  I'll be curious to see what newer
versions of Mozilla do as they add a default stylesheet for XML.

(Hmmm... RDF documents could all come with stylesheet PIs for
presentation, but somehow I doubt that would go over well with RDF or
solve IE's lack of interest in application/rdf+xml.)

-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

Received on Thursday, 31 October 2002 20:40:50 UTC