Re: how to express HTML in Turtle as a hypermedia type

Erik,

are you making this stuff up as you go? Because there is no substance in it.

You claim that an RDF client needs to "learn how to behave" and
"understand how to behave". What does that even mean? Learn how to
behave when "ordering a pizza" or "buying a book"? If you want the
client to grasp the conceptual models of those domains, then we have a
problem. But who said that we need to go to such high level of
abstraction to carry out the intended action? The only thing the
client has to do, is to communicate the intended state change at the
level of RDF data model.

In the HTML analogy that you like, the browser has no idea "how to
behave", or what the user is trying to achieve when submitting a form.
The only thing it knows how to send a POST request with
"application/x-www-form-urlencoded" form control values. And for that
matter, it might not even be a browser, but a PHP script or other
program without any forms sending the request encoded in the same way.

Why don't you finally look at some formal and rigorous research
completed in this area and then say what you think? Here it is:
http://antoniogarrote.github.com/clj-plaza/assets/WSREST2010paper.pdf

Martynas

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Erik Wilde <dret@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> hello henry.
>
>
> On 2013-03-28 01:34 , Henry Story wrote:
>>>
>>> can you write me turtle that describes completely to a client how it has
>>> to implement HTML form submissions? i think (correct me if i am wrong) that
>>> your claim is that i can describe everything about a media type that needs
>>> to be know in RDF. assume i want to write a media type that defines the
>>> exact same submission rules for form fields that HTML defines, including the
>>> dance around GET/POST and multi-part submissions for file uploads and so
>>> forth. if you can write RDF that does that, and show me a generic RDF client
>>> with no knowledge of HTML than then is able to do everything that an HTML
>>> needs to do, then i rest my case.
>>
>> See Mark Baker's proposal.
>
>
> this is not enough, this is just surface syntax. your claim is that just by
> GETting some RDF, a generic RDF client can learn how to behave according to
> a new set of rules (implement a new protocol), and all of this is completely
> represented by the RDF. because of this, you claim, we don't need to have
> any indication on the interaction level, because any RDF client will be able
> to do that at runtime on demand.
>
> writing something like <rf:Form rf:method="POST"> is not different like
> writing something like <html:form method="POST">, on the surface. i guess
> that's pretty obvious. HTML requires that a client knows forms, or it will
> not know how to behave. your claim is that for RDForms, this is different,
> and any RDF client will be able to look at <rf:Form rf:method="POST"> and
> understand how to behave. could you please walk me through all the steps
> that will allow a generic RDF client to do this?
>
> afaict, RDForms includes (by reference) the HTML forms processing rules, and
> does not even attempt to encode these in RDF. so what you have referred to,
> afaict, is not the definition of a media type, but a syntax, which
> critically relies (in this case) on the definition of HTML (which uses a
> different syntax, but now they share the same processing model).
>
> don't get me wrong, i think it is perfectly fine to specify the processing
> model by documentation (or by reference to existing documentation) and just
> define a way how to represent data that is processed according to this
> processing model. but then there has to be some identifier that allows
> agents to talk about the processing models they know and implement. it's a
> conversation about supported vocabularies. your claim is that if i do not
> support RDForms and GET some RDF that uses it, i can learn, just by reading
> and interpreting RDF, what to do. where is that RDF? we need to look at that
> RDF *defining the media type by fully describing it in RDF*, and the web
> page you linked to simply has examples of *using the media type*.
>
> cheers,
>
> dret.
>

Received on Thursday, 28 March 2013 15:27:45 UTC