Re: RDFa in HTML issues wiki page created

Hi Julian,

> The issue here is that there doesn't seem to be agreement outside the XHTML2
> WG that that WG indeed is responsible for maintaining the list of reserved
> keywords. Pretending that what you decided is good for RDFa in XHTML doesn't
> necessarily mean it's going to work everywhere else.

That isn't how it works at all.

Unlike other proposals of this ilk, which decide that there should be
some kind of centralised registry, the RDFa solution was simply to say
that any host language is free to define its own reserved words.

Also, although the RDFa spec doesn't currently use the CURIE spec,
they are in sync, and you'll see that the latter also specifically
allows for predefined tokens to be processed first, before doing
normal CURIE-processing.

The upshot of this approach in both RDFa and CURIEs, is that a
language that 'hosts' RDFa (such as SVG-Tiny, XHTML 1.x, XHTML 2, HTML
4, HTML5 so on) or CURIES (such as @role), can define its own list of
'tokens' that are specific to its own language. However, tokens that
include a prefix will be universal and will give the same URI in any
host language.

This provides a good compromise between extensibility and
domain-specific ease of authoring.

And since we already have this flexibility, in my opinion the key
priority is therefore not a centralised registry, but to provide a way
for authors to share short-form 'tokens' across languages [1]. This
would provide a way that people can mark up documents with RDFa in a
kind of Microformats-style, but without having to go through the
central registry approach.

Regards,

Mark

[1] <http://webbackplane.com/mark-birbeck/blog/2009/04/30/tokenising-the-semantic-web>

-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
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Received on Tuesday, 26 May 2009 11:30:31 UTC