Re: GRDDL and HTML5

On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, Harry Halpin wrote:
> 
> People are not encouraged to make "custom" profiles for hCard, etc., 
> that would be foolish.

I agree, but I did see people do it some time back.


> But you might want to make your own profile, say "microChemistry", and 
> give it a profile page, and use that profile. Profiles are extensible.

You could do the same thing but without the profile page, just by adding 
the transformation to your list of GRDDL transformations. Then it would 
even work on pages that use your vocabulary but forgot to copy the 
profile="".


> The general idea behind using profiles was *not* as a substitute for a a 
> link to a GRDDL transform, but that authors that use profiles could add 
> a link to GRDDL transform to their profile page, and the GRDDL algorithm 
> could look for a GRDDL transform there if one wasn't directly linked. 
> Think of it as a short-cut for document authors - they just have to 
> think about using particular profiles, rather than directly linking to a 
> GRDDL transformation.

Not having a profile="" attribute is also a shortcut for document authors. 
Instead of having to think about using particular profiles, they just have 
to use them, possibly without knowing (e.g. by pasting in code from tools 
or other pages).


> That way the owner of the profile document can upgrade the GRDDL 
> transformation once without modifying all instance data that uses that 
> profile.

I understand that the RDF community believes that it is better for content 
to define how its vocabularies work (whatever that means) rather than 
having the tools just natively support the vocabularies, but it seems much 
better to me to just have the tools natively support the vocabularies. 
That way, you upgrade the tool and everything works better, instead of 
having to upgrade the tool and the vocabulary definitions and hope that 
everyone has linked everything together.


> So, our "microChemistry" profile page could embed a GRDDL tranformation 
> directly in that profile page, or require all instance data to both list 
> the profile page and a rel="transformation" directly to the profile. The 
> first seems easier.

Wouldn't the easiest option just be for people who want to use GRDDL to 
obtain "microChemistry" data to just tell GRDDL about microChemistry, and 
not require the authos to do any linking at all?


> Again, the use of profiles and direct linking to a GRDDL transform via 
> rel="transformation" are two separate cases. I assume you are happy with 
> rel="transformation" rather than rel="grddl-transformation".

I am, but some people seem to think that clashes are a problem and would 
rather that all names be long URLs, so others may object.

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

Received on Monday, 25 August 2008 12:27:32 UTC