Re: why "describedby" instead of "meta"?

Jonathan,

I hope you don't mind me copying my reply to the public list but Julian 
Reschke just asked me about the same thing so I'd like to record the 
answer.

In our earlier drafts we were going to use rel="powder" with the 
existing XML and RDF MIME types for POWDER and POWDER-S respectively. 
However, Mark Nottingham [1] advised that a better way would be to 
define a more generic relationship type but define specific MIME types - 
hence one of my jobs this week is to register text/powder+xml and 
application/powder-s+xml.

Could we use meta? Yes, we could, and we came close to doing so. There 
are no strong feelings in the group but there was a very slight edge in 
favour of describedby as meta _appears_ to be associated specifically 
with RDF. That is, when building application to handle rel="meta" 
/might/ assume that the target of such a link is RDF. This is wrong - it 
could be anything - but that might be an assumption in the real world. 
Equally, it would be wrong to say that describedby will always point to 
POWDER, that isn't our intention, but, I guess, it is a nod to 
practicality over theory.

We do actually refer to rel="meta" in our documentation where we discuss 
a resource linking to a POWDER processor from which RDF triples may be 
returned to describe that resource [2]. If there were strong feeling 
that we should use rel="meta" then I don't think we'd put up much 
resistance (but the request to register describedby has been made to  IANA!)

Meanwhile - a reply to your comments on the formal doc has been prepared 
and should be posted in the very near future.

Cheers

Phil.


[1] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-powderwg/2008Aug/0000.html 
onwards
[2] See just below example 3-2 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-powder-dr-20081114/#eg3-2


Jonathan Rees wrote:
> I just found a definition of "meta", in
> http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab/ which has a date of 2008-10-21.
> Repeated in http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/.
> Not sure how it differs from "describedby". What do you think?
>
> These documents also give yet another registry of link types... not
> that I'm collecting them, but I wasn't really aware of it before.
>
> Jonathan
>
>   


-- 

Phil Archer
w. http://philarcher.org/

Received on Monday, 24 November 2008 15:56:10 UTC