Re: Use cases

On 01.01.2011 16:57, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 2:40 PM, Julian Reschke<julian.reschke@gmx.de>  wrote:
>>> Sprinkingly some namespaces around does not magically produce a
>>> document that software can turn into a human-friendly hypermedia
>>> interface.
>
>> It may or may not.
>
> Please detail when it would work and why?

It would work when producers and consumers agree on how to handle the 
namespace. We've seen this happening for things like SVG and MathML, so 
there's evidence that it can happen.

It can also happen in controlled environments, where you may be able to 
rely on certain browser extensions to be there.

> That is, how might it happen without the web's client software being
> updated to build interfaces on top of the semantics expressed by those
> namespaced vocabularies?

For instance, by sending Javascript code along with the page that 
consumes the XML.

> My argument is not: namespaces make it impossible to build uniform
> hypermedia interfaces.
>
> My argument is: using arbitrary vocabularies to express renderable
> content, rather than merely annotate it with metadata, will break
> those interfaces, and namespaces do *nothing* to help with this
> situation. How could they?

I do agree that in many cases annotating the (X)HTML with metadata is a 
better approach. It would be great if we would already have achieved 
more with respect to this (see DC-HTML vs RDFa vs RDFa 1.1 vs Microdata).

But sometimes, annotating the HTML clearly is not the best approach, in 
which case alternate embeddable vocabularies may be the better choice.

>> How is this in any way different from using Microdata, RDFa, script elements
>> or data-* attributes, though? After all, it's just a different way of
>> embedding the information.
>
> It's different because in conforming HTML, the renderable content is
> marked up with generic document semantics on top of which the web's
> client software has been programmed to build hypermedia interfaces.
> This means any human being with access to such software can use your
> service.
> ...

Your previous email sounded like you're saying that sticking arbitrary 
XML into data-* attributes or script tags is somehow better than using 
the XHTML/namespaces extension point. I just wanted to state that *if* 
you want to stick arbitrary XML into the document, "hiding" it in 
existing elements or attributes just for the sake of document 
conformance is a bad idea.

 > ...

Best regards, Julian

Received on Saturday, 1 January 2011 17:15:25 UTC