Re: talking again

On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 13:33 +0200, Steven Pemberton wrote:
> On Mon, 30 May 2005 19:40:55 +0200, Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> > I talked with Steven about this last week, urging that the only
> > workable solution was choosing 2 attribute names. Not clear what the best
> > names are, though.
> 
> Since that discussion, I talked with Mark, and he argued that the fake URL  
> solutions are still workable (I expect he'll mail about it today as well).
> 
> The argument goes: suppose we adopt an XPointer solution, called, say,  
> #some()
> 
> 	<link about="#some(a)" rel="foaf:mbox" href="dan@example.com" />
> 	<link about="#some(b)" rel="foaf:mbox" href="libby@example.net" />
> 
> 	<link about="#some(a)" rel="foaf:knows" href="#some(b)" />

I understand in theory that you can do this, but it is pretty
misleading. Not least
since the attribute name "about" is copied from the URI-taking attribute
of the 
same name in W3C's existing RDF/XML syntax. I'm a standards nerd, and
I'm 
still fuzzy on what the rules would be for detecting whether the value
of an 
"about" attribute here would be an xpointer-esque bnode localID, versus
a 
(possibly relative) URI reference. 

Aside: would xml:base affect this attribute? including the
xpointer-bnode IDs?

> These *look* like URIs (and have to in order to be able to use the same  
> attributes), but all they really are is a message to the RDF serialiser to  
> transform them into RDF bnodes. 

So what would you write if the RDF triples you were trying to encode
really 
did want to make assertions about local xpointers?

There are legitimate triples that can be written with an xpointer-based
local
URI reference; we just need to take care not to confuse them with
triples 
whose subjects are bnodes. 

> 			Although they are URLs in the HTML world,  
> when they get into the RDF world, they are not any more, they are bnodes.
> 
> The advantages of this approach:
> 
> 	The markup is simpler

...by hiding structure in attribute content conventions, sure.

> 	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.

> 	We only have to argue about one name instead of two :-)

Yup. I think naming these attributes is worth some thought. Hmm...

	
> Steven

Dan

ps. congrats on shipping a new WD :)

-- 
Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
W3C

Received on Tuesday, 31 May 2005 11:43:15 UTC