Comments on @profile

I got most of the points I'd make on the matter in a blog post, pasted
below for convenience.

In approaching the HTML5 group I'd suggest emphasing the language of
"links" rather than "HTTP dereferenceable URIs" etc. The web is about
links...profiles are links...

There's another argument, based on "Separation Of Concerns" in:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ProposedDesignPrinciples
that it should be possible to treat *data* as a separate concern (in
addition to human-readable content & presentation).

Anyhow, here's the long one -
[[
One of the apparently trickiest set of comments on
public-grddl-comments came from Ryan King, in relation to
microformats. This seems like a good opportunity to give my opinion
(unofficial - the issue's closed).

So, as the GRDDL charter says:

    The mission of this Working Group is to complement the concrete
RDF/XML syntax with a mechanism to relate other XML syntaxes
(especially XHTML dialects or "microformats") to the RDF abstract
syntax via transformations identified by URIs.

Ryan says :

    Given that the majority of the web is something other than "Valid
XHTML", this spec doesn't seem to be very useful on the Web.

He also mentions GRDDL's need for a profile reference, and the
practical issues related to that.

HarryH answered Ryan's points (to his satisfaction) by adding some
informative text to the effect that you can always run Tidy or
somesuch over anyHTML to get XHTML.

But taking a step back, microformats offer a set of conventions
whereby publishers can embed data in their documents in a form that
can be extracted in a consistent fashion. To use microformats, the
publisher will have to modify their existing markup. Prior to
microformats.org, one could have said "given that the majority of the
web is something other than microformats...". I don't see a great deal
of difference between publishers changing their markup to be
GRDDL-friendly as changing it to be microformats-friendly (and ideally
the changes will be exactly the same).

Personally I'd strongly recommend the use of profiles with
microformats, and not just because of the GRDDL scenario. Without
them, ok, there is the possibility for naming clashes (unlikely) but
also there's the principle of string-squatting. Once microformats.org
has claimed a class name, it's not available for use for any other
purpose by other people (without the risk of misinterpretation by
microformat tools). URIs are the identifiers on the web, they enable
the distributed, independent development which has led to the success
of the web. I'd suggest that turning microformats.org into another
registrar of special strings runs counter to this.

Another point is that if HTTP URIs are used for the profiles then it
is possible for a human or machine to follow their nose to the profile
page and get more information. This presumably was the intent behind
XMDP profiles, and is how GRDDL works (one of the coolest bits of
GRDDL is how this can happen recursively). Very webby, with
dependencies on centralised authorities at a minimum.

Regarding the current proposal that HTML5 (or whatever it gets called)
drops the profile attribute, that seems seriously wrong-minded, for
the reasons given above. If anything the attribute should be allowed
on some of the block tags - maybe <p> - so it'll be possible to state
clearly that a given microformat convention (or GRDDL transformation)
applies to the markup within the block. Google is not the only fruit.

To summarise, GRDDL in XHTML makes it possible for the publisher to
express data on the web in a form which can be (relatively)
unambiguously interpreted by any consumers. The fact that most
documents on the web don't currently follow the (microformat,
GRDDL...) conventions is fairly irrelevant. There's nothing to stop
scrapers scraping HTML and getting useful data, but data arbitrarily
scraped from the web will lack the chain network of authority that
mechanisms like @profile (and GRDDL) provide. This is about adding
utility (for those that desire it) based on existing specifications,
rather than working around limitations of markup in the wild.
]]
http://dannyayers.com/2007/06/25/grddl-progress

-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2007 16:23:01 UTC