Re: Affordances wiki page

hello john.

On 2013-03-03 18:41 , "John Arwe" <johnarwe@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>Erik, your HTML example strengthens the suspicion that had been growing
>in me about your initial response (paraphrased playback) "the rows on
>that page are not affordances", i.e. about how you were using the word.
>As you're
> using it, affordances are at a higher level of abstraction and what the
>wiki page lists (or did, last I looked - on a plane now so unable to
>check) are "just" spec options - things overtly relegated to
>implementation choice.  Those would have an n:m relation
> with affordances, by your definition.  Getting closer?

do you have any idea where the http://www.w3.org/wiki/RdfAffordances page
originates? i would argue that it contains some really misguided ideas,
such as looking at the URIs in RDF as links. this mixes RDF's data model
(which happens to be URI-based) with an entirely different issue, which is
the question of how to represent hypermedia affordances (now i am using
the term as i am used to it from the hypermedia/REST community), and once
you start doing that, i don't think there's any way to get out of this
initial conflation of concepts.

for me, affordances are the critical parts of hypermedia formats that
guide clients through the media type, allowing them choices of
navigational paths while they are traversing the interlinked set of
resources exposed as hypermedia. RDF doesn't have anything to contribute
here as it doesn't have links. so affordances (again, in my view of the
term) would be the kinds of things a hypermedia format such as LDP would
add, saying "when you find this link in a representation, then you can
follow it, and you have to interact in the following way when you follow
it, and then you can expect the following thing to happen."

cheers,

dret.

Received on Monday, 4 March 2013 09:51:19 UTC