Re: Responses to objections to the Microformats rel registry CP

Hi Danny,

On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 03:17, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com> wrote:
> Both yourself and Tantek have made the point that the bar to creating
> a new rel value is low with the microformats-wiki-as-registry
> approach, yet I note on the registry page [1] :
> [[
> If you wish to develop a new rel value, please follow the microformats process.
> ]]

Immediately after that it also says to go ahead and add your new rel
value to the brainstorming proposals section of the
existing-rel-values page, which I realized based on your email might
seem as a serial step rather than a parallel step and thus have
clarified it:

http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-registry#new_rel_values

> The microformats process [2] is long (creating 9 pages, moving through
> 3 stages) and geared towards creating a whole new vocabulary, there
> seems a whole lot of baggage here that doesn't seem appropriate for
> the creation of individual terms.

Yes, the process is designed more for object property vocabularies
than for rel values, yet most of its real world and research based
steps still apply to rel values as well.

> in case the
> microformats community is to become the registrar, I strongly suggest
> that a dedicated process is created for rel terms, and the way they
> are documented be restructured.

There is certainly room for a simplified version directed specifically
at rel values. That's a very reasonable suggestion.

If you have specific restructuring suggestions, please send them to
the microformats-discuss mailing list:
microformats-discuss@microformats.org

Until then, provisional registration does not require going through
the process, and there are plenty of folks around in the microformats
community (e.g. on IRC) that can help with questions, including with
the process itself - many new rel values were more rapidly developed
through collaboration in the community.


> There is an unavoidable mismatch between the requirements for
> microformats and the requirements for the rel registry. In principle
> there are a vast number of conceptual relations that could potentially
> apply between any two resources (and the door to these should be kept
> open in the use of URIs for rel values). Most vocabularies defined for
> Web semantics are compiled according to their domain. But here the
> domain is wide open : "document" - and we are looking at terms that
> may be used in a specific syntactic construct.

I'm having trouble understanding your concern here as it is too
abstract for me to grasp.

Could you provide a real world example of such an "unavoidable
mismatch between the requirements" ?


> It's probably leading out of scope here, but whatever the decision on
> registry, I hope some work is done to sensibly categorise a vocabulary
> that includes terms such as "stylesheet" and "sweetheart".

What do you mean by "categorise"?

E.g. if you have a proposal for a hierarchical taxonomy for rel values
and how such a categorization/taxonomy would help end users, authors,
developers etc. - I encourage you to write it up on a wiki page for
consideration.

Thanks,

Tantek


> [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-registry
> [2] http://microformats.org/wiki/process


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Received on Saturday, 2 April 2011 17:25:31 UTC