Re: talking again

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 14:45 +0200, Steven Pemberton wrote:

> >> The advantages of this approach:
> >>
> >> 	The markup is simpler
> >
> > ...by hiding structure in attribute content conventions, sure.
> 
> I disagree. There is no hiding going on: it is an explicit notation, and  
> the metadata really *is* 'about' the bnode.

No. The metadata really is 'about' the thing the bnode stands for in
the 
world, eg. a person, or a place. Bnodes are engineering artifacts, parts
of
an abstract structure related to RDF serialization. They have
importantly
different properties to the things they stand for, eg. two bnodes can
represent the same real world thing. For sanity sake, RDF people tend
to 
avoid writing RDF descriptions about bnodes, although it could be done.

(sorry to be nitpicky on this, but such seemingly academic distinctions
made
RDF pretty confusing pre-rdfcore days... eg. talk of 'anonymous
resources', 
as if lacking a uri was a property of people, places... rather than of
their descriptions).

> >> 	Less explaining to do
> >
> > I'm not so sure on that point. Particularly if you include the
> > confusion
> > it'll create around the other "about" attribute, ie. the one in RDF/XML
> > which
> > doesn't behave like this.
> 
> I think it is easier to say "if you don't know what you are referring to,  
> you can give it a name as a placeholder" rather than having to explain  
> that there are two new attributes that replace 'about' and 'href' in  
> certain cases.

"you can give it a name, indicating that it is a placeholder by using
the foo and bar
attributes". Whichever way we go, I'm sure we'll need more detailed
documentation than can fit in the xhtml 2 spec itself...

> >> 	We only have to argue about one name instead of two :-)
> >
> > Yup. I think naming these attributes is worth some thought. Hmm...
> 
> > ps. congrats on shipping a new WD :)
> 
> Thanks... Already 300 new issues come in to the database.

Wohoo. Hopefully some duplicates...

Dan

Received on Thursday, 2 June 2005 14:24:29 UTC