The Scope Requirement (Was: Validating XHTML with embedded RDF)

On Wednesday 25 June 2003 18:28, Dan Brickley wrote:
> > 3. Semantics:
> > a. Solve the arbitrary semantics of mixed XML problem.
> > Assessment: I'm avoiding the issue the TAG is facing on what is the
> > "meaning" of all these things when combined beyond "ignore the
> > namespaces you don't know."
> >   http://www.w3.org/2002/04/htmlrdf
>
> Hard problem. Some approach based on identifying islands / sub-trees
> makes sense. I don't think we need to deal with this now, except perhaps
> some notion of 'quoting', so that the place within which (RDF) content
> appears in the enclosing elements is significant to the RDF's
> relationship to the document as a whole. But we can avoid this for now,
> and just define HTML/META and that would be a major improvement.

I agree that we should punt on this. However I'll note that this will mean 
that we don't support the Trackback scenario of associating metadata with 
fragment identifiers. But that's a really complex architectural issue and 
it just means a Trackback needs to specify/understand its RDF in XHTML 
context, it won't be inherent to the XML itself -- yet.

I'll also note that it still also leaves the question of which of the 
following [1] do we support:
 3. Scope
  a. The RDF MUST be semantically context free and inherits no
     context from its container document. (If it is metadata about
     that document, it should state rdf:about="".)
  b. The RDF MUST apply only to its containing document. [FOAF]

The DC approaches that Dave discussed seem to be of type "b", but I don't 
think that will be good in the arbitrary RDF case, where it's much better 
to be explicit if I have "non-flat" assertions. I'd advocate for A. What do 
you think?

[1] http://www.w3.org/2003/03/rdf-in-xml.html#req-scope

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 16:50:05 UTC