Re: isDefinedBy and isDescribedBy, Tale of two missing predicates

Ian Davis wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:
>> Better clear that up, noticed that it's an age old XHTML-RDFa potential
>> issue, so I'll see if we can get it covered in the WG and relay back to the
>> TAG to hopefully clear the issue.
> 
> Suppose I assign the ID 'mars' to represent the planet mars in my RDFa
> document. I can then refer to it using http://example.com/foo#mars.
> What does it mean when my javascript calls
> document.getElementById('mars')? Should I expect now to manipulate the
> planet mars?

Ian..

See if you can find a mention of @id in either:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/
   http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-core/

RDFa doesn't use @id.

However, to address the non existent issue as if it did exist.

HTML is an AST which encodes a DOM, the @id is an attribute which is to 
be applied to the DOM element in the DOM, in memory. User agents which 
use display the DOM use @id to reference the element, and via several 
forms of indirection they will often align the view of a document to the 
element with that @id if it's requested to do so. It so happens that 
User Agents will display this @id appended to the main document URI in 
the statues bar of the User Agent (possibly) when it does this. I can 
assure you, you've not just minted a URI.

As for javascript document.getElementById('mars'), as explain above all 
you're doing is pulling an object from memory which has an id attribute 
specified in an AST applied to it. How that relates to URIs or to us on 
the semantic web I'm unsure.

Now, let's just suppose that RDFa did use @id - well, what would happen 
is an RDFa processor would analyse the DOM document (not the HTML 
document, nor the AST) and when it found an @id it would combine the 
string lexical form of it, with the string lexical form of the relevant 
base, then create an IRI compatible RDF URI Reference out of it, then it 
would keep hunting down the DOM using the processing rules, and maybe it 
would find enough attributes to find a statement which is encoded in the 
document, this may comprise of other RDF URI References or Plain / 
Literals, and then finally you'll get some RDF to work with. You may 
notice that the RDF URI Reference isn't even in the document (HTML, AST 
or DOM) - and certainly isn't in the @id.

But remember, RDFa doesn't use @id, nor does HTML have RDF URI 
References in it ;)

Best,

Nathan

Received on Friday, 5 November 2010 16:16:00 UTC