Status of RDF in XHTML 2.0 WD

Hi Ben and Mark,

I have been reading the XHTML 2.0 WD carefully and comparing it to  
Mark's excellent 14 Feb paper, "XHTML and RDF".

It seems to me that Mark's suggestion on making the 'rel' attribute  
able to contain QNAMES is a very good one, even critical.  Mark goes on  
to suggest that all values in 'rel' would need to be namespace-prefixed  
for consistency.  The HTML WG seems to have done something a little bit  
different:

The XHTML 2.0 WD seems to say that 'rel' can contain either a list of  
pre-defined values (given in  
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod- 
metaAttributes.html#s_metaAttributesmodule) or user-defined values with  
defined namespaces.  They go on to add another variant that relates to  
RDF:  The use of rel='profile' to point to an external RDF document.

I *think* this covers the necessary cases in terms of XHTML syntax, at  
the expense of a lot of syntactic noise.

Am I reading this correctly?

I'm not sure there isn't a presumption in the use of rel='profile' that  
RDF is accessible solely by pointing to RDF/XML documents.  I *think*  
that to really make a Semantic Web, one has to presume the ability to  
navigate cleanly from "Web Space" (often in HTML) to "RDF Space" (graph  
traversal) and back again.  I don't think that simply pointing to  
RDF/XML documents necessarily does that.

Pardon the rant, I am still formulating some thoughts on the matter and  
would appreciate comments.

Regards,
Dave
--
David Wood
CTO, Tucana Technologies, Inc.
http://www.tucanatech.com
--------------------> Information Fusion. Tucana. <--------------------

Received on Saturday, 4 September 2004 17:10:14 UTC