Re: a note on links

Hey Raj,

nice concise feedback in your previous email...thanks 8)

As for the link model...my goal in the top section of the examples page
was to show how many of these things could be handled in 3 ways.  Let's
take author as an example.

1. omit it
I don't think this would be a required field so a POI publisher could
choose to drop this field if they wanted to.

2. link it
If the POI publisher wants to refer to the author but doesn't think it's
important to inline it then they could provide an implicit link.
In json this would be...

        {
          ...
          author:"http://mob-labs.com/poiwg/example02/pois/",
          ...
        }

In xml this would be ...

        <pois href="http://mob-labs.com/poiwg/example02/pois.xml" xml:lang="en">
          ...
          <author href="http://mob-labs.com/poiwg/example02/robman" />
          ...
        </pois>

NOTE: Now that I look at the example I actually included I had only put
an email address.  This is misleading so I've updated that in the draft
example02.

3. inline it
If the POI publisher thinks it's important for this information to be
serialised inline then they can also do that - effectively unfolding the
link.  I used the atom:author params but I agree with you that
vcard/hcard may be a better data structure.
In json this would be...

        {
          ...
          author:{
                   name:"", <- atom:name
                   email:"", <- atom:email
                   href:"" <- atom:uri
                 },
          ...
        }

In xml this would be...

        <pois href="http://mob-labs.com/poiwg/example02/pois.xml" xml:lang="en">
          ...
          <author href="http://mob-labs.com/poiwg/example02/robman">  <- href/link is optional
            <name>Rob Manson</name>
            <email>roBman@mob-labs.com</email>
          </author>
          ...
        </pois>
        
In html5 this would be...

        <span>
          ...inline author microdata goes here...
          <link itemprop="author" href="http://mob-labs.com/poiwg/example02/robman">
        </span>

NOTE: I've updated the uri field to be href as the intent here was that
this optional field could then also act like the link approach in point
2. above.  So if this field is not included then only the serialised
information about the author is known.  But if href/link is included
then we would also know what the authoritative source for info about
this author is.

I think there are a number of levels within the POI data model that
would really benefit from these 3 options of omit/link/inline.

So my goal is not to enforce the use of link...but allow it as one valid
approach.  And allowing link's to optionally embed extra info like
rights, version-history, etc. means that these things can be injected at
many levels (e.g. pois, poi or specific fields) at the POI publishers
discretion.

Update draft is here: http://mob-labs.com/poiwg/example02/index.html 

roBman


On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 08:47 -0400, Raj Singh wrote:
> In the last F2F we talked a lot about using the HTML5 link tag as much
> as possible. We tried to shoehorn many concepts into link. After
> further thought, I want to back off this approach. 
> 
> HTML5 links never have inline content. We want that option. And their
> meaning and usage is different than ours. For example, we want to
> inline author information sometimes. Using a "link" object and
> actually defining what it really is with the link's "rel" attribute
> does adds an unnecessary level of complexity with no real benefit to
> developers or users as the relationship between HTML5 links and our
> idea of links is weak. 
> 
> I propose instead to name elements what we want them to be -- e.g.
> "author" -- and have global attributes that can appear on all these
> elements such as "href" and "type" (and "lang" and "updated").
> 
> ---
> Raj
> The OGC: Making location count...
> http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 28 September 2011 23:02:16 UTC