GRDDL (was: RE: Extensibility strategies)

I've never heard of GRDDL until a week or two ago. I just checked it out.
It's a good idea, and it looks like it mostly does what I want. The problem
that I see with it:

* It is highly complex - Look at the diagrams on that page... anything that
requires that many transformations and steps is prone to failure and
problems. One misbehaving parser in that chain breaks it.

* Confusing - Maybe the spec is still a draft, but I am a smart guy and it
took way too long for me to "get" this document. Even worse, it relies upon
having an in-depth understanding of another obscure spec, RDF (another one I
never heard of until a few days ago).

* More "heavy duty" than what most HTML authors will actually be able to
make use of.

* HTML abuse - This seems to be predicated on abusing and mis-using HTML.
Maybe I am reading it wrong.

* Relies upon XML - Other than a core group of elite XML users, XML "in the
real world" is used as an expensive CSV replacement. I would much rather see
a simplistic, CSS-like dialect that is familiar to HTML authors with
forgiving error handling rules. Not to bring up the "XML topic" but from
where I sit, anything that tries to meld HTML with XML is bound to not get
adopted in large numbers, regardless of its utility.

In a nutshell, I want to see something that "Joe Six Pack" can use and that
takes, oh, 1 - 2 pages of text to explain:

* Why this needs to be used
* The advantages of using it
* The complete syntax of using it
* Error handling
* How/where/when to use this

And everything else from there should simply be references of the various
items that can be used. That requirements list is met by HTML and it is met
by CSS, and that is really the "upper limit" on complexity that the HTML
authoring community tends to accept.

So to me, a better approach is to take something a lot more in-line with
what the HTML authoring community will use, and provide a mapping to GRDDL.

J.Ja

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Toby Inkster
> Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 1:09 PM
> To: public-html@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Extensibility strategies, was: Deciding in public (Was:
> SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal)
> 
> 
> Justin James wrote:
> 
> > like CSS but for semantics
> 
> That's precisely what GRDDL is - a "semantics sheet", much like a
> stylesheet - a way to map tag names, class names, etc to RDF triples.
> 
> --
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 19:23:15 UTC