- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2006 09:40:27 -0600
- To: Ian Davis <ian.davis@talis.com>
- Cc: public-grddl-wg <public-grddl-wg@w3.org>
On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 20:26 +0000, Ian Davis wrote: > This is a review of the introduction section of "Gleaning Resource > Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL), editor's draft $Date: > 2006/11/21 16:29:36 $" I found at http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec Thanks for the review; in addition to striking some text in response to other comments, this resulted in just one change: http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec#changes Revision 1.165 2006/11/22 15:37:30 connolly s/is a mechanism for/stands for/ Details... > "There are many dialects of languages in practice among the many XML > documents on the web." > > This seems self-evident and unnecessary and i would strike it. It's the > stated purpose of XML to enable many different languages to be created. It's traditional to start an introduction with a statement that the reader is familiar with, no? > "There are dialects of XHTML, XML and RDF" > > I can grok dialects of XML but not of RDF and XHTML. Please point to > some examples of dialects of RDF. If by dialect you mean "pattern of > usage" then I can possibly understand inclusion of XHTML, but why isn't > XHTML simply treated as a dialect of XML? Besides isn't the usual term > an "application of XML"? GRDDL is a neat acronym but that doesn't mean > we need to focus unnecessarily on the components of that acronym. Lacking a suggest replacement, I'm OK with it as is. (I'll abbreviate this to NOOP from here on.) > "Recently, two progressive encoding techniques have emerged to overlay > additional semantics onto valid XHTML documents: RDFa and microformats > offer simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted > standards." > > Why not include embedded RDF here? By implication it's not progressive. > The use of the term "recently" gives a temporal nature to this > specification that isn't warranted. Why not replace with "Two encoding > techniques that overlay additional semantics onto valid XHTML documents > are... which offer..." I struck it. > "While this breadth of expression is quite liberating, inspiring new > dialects to codify both common and customized meanings, it can prove to > be a barrier to understanding across different domains or fields. How, > for example, does software discover the author of a poem, a spreadsheet > and an ontology? And how can software determine whether authors of each > are in fact the same person?" > > GRDDL doesn't solve this problem. GRDDL gets you part of the way - > normalising the expression of semantics so that you can then use other > mechanisms to determine the above information. Recommend that this > entire paragraph is rewritten to describe what GRDDL actually does. NOOP. > I am not convinced that a table is appropriate for the visual layout of > the examples. This is not tabular data but simply a list of examples > which we could style to appear in a grid. I agree, but I don't know enough CSS to style it. Help? > "Using URIs to uniquely identify the book, the author and even the > relationship would facilitate software design because not everyone knows > Stephen King or even spells his name consistently." > > I have trouble interpreting this fragment. "facilitate software design" > provides no meaning for me. NOOP. > The RDF Stephen King example seems to ignore the advice given earlier in > the introduction of giving important things URIs. The foaf:Person is a > blank node. The appearance of both dc:creator and foaf:maker is just > going to be confusing to newcomers - what's the difference? why use one > over the other? questions we shouldn't have to answer in this spec. NOOP. > "GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects > of Languages" > > What are the other mechanisms? Are there any? Is it a mechanism or a > pattern of usage? Can we replace with text simply saying that this is > what GRDDL stands for. OK. > "GRDDL provides a relatively inexpensive mechanism for bootstrapping RDF > content from uniform XML dialects; shifting the burden from formulating > RDF to creating transformation algorithms specifically for each dialect." > > First "relatively inexpensive" is valueless. What is it compared to? If > it compares "formulating RDF" to "creating transformation algorithms" > then I would hazard a guess that the latter is much harder since you > must necessarily do the former first. Linking to those transformations > is the easy and "inexpensive" part. Second what is a "uniform" XML > dialect and how does it differ from other XML dialects? NOOP. > "The use of XSLT to generate XHTML from single-purpose XML vocabularies > is historically celebrated as a powerful idiom for separating structured > content from presentation." > > "Historically celebrated" seems rather strong for technologies that have > existed for only half a decade. Why not "widely regarded" instead? I struck that bit. > "GRDDL shifts this idiom to a different end: " > > This seems clumsy. And it anthropomorphizes GRDDL. Can GRDDL be said to > _do_ anything? What about simply "GRDDL can be used to separate document > structure from its authoritative meaning" I struck that bit too. > > "Content authors can nominate the transformations for producing RDF from > their content and use GRDDL to refer to them." > > We get to the point in the very last sentence! Why don't we say this as > the first sentence of the introduction? NOOP. > I believe this discharges my outstanding action > > > Ian > -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541 0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E
Received on Wednesday, 22 November 2006 15:41:03 UTC