Re: Comments on "Providing and Discovering Definitions of URIs"

Regarding section 3.4.2 Local identifiers are easily lost: there's some concern that MVC-based web frameworks such as Django and Sinatra) are not good about preserving local identifiers. I work with Sinatra a fair amount, as well as other such frameworks. In my experience, there is nothing in particular about Sinatra that places a burden on a web developer from maintaining local identifiers. There are a number of markup technologies in use within Sinatra (ERB, Haml) that are used for creating markup, and all of them allow complete control over the creation of an HTML DOM, including the use of classes and ids (resulting in fragment identifiers).

The problem, I think, is that some web developers do not fully understand why maintaining consistency and uniqueness among identifiers within a web page is important. This isn't something that I've experienced personally, but the ability to mint local identifiers, either for DOM manipulation through jQuery, for example has made it clear to developers why this is important.

Of course, the other aspect of local identifiers is through RDFa fragment identifiers. Other than developers that are manually creating this type of markup, this is not really an issue. Furthermore, it's possible that HTML identifiers (@id) and RDFa identifiers (@about, @resource, ...) might have overlapping namespaces that do not necessarily identify the same resource. In practice, this is not an issue for most developers who are usually working in one domain or the other. RDFa attributes are not commonly used as CSS selectors.

Gregg Kellogg

Received on Thursday, 1 March 2012 02:44:01 UTC