CURIEs, xmlns and bandwidth

Hi Mark and others,
 
We've been spending a lot of time discussing CURIEs at the IPTC 
meeting taking place this week in Milan and were very glad to see 
the CURIE Note and the updated RDF/A document.  We have one big 
problem, though, and that is this ...
 
We plan to use CURIEs for everything, including the principal 
taxonomies themselves, as well as all the related info, like @role, 
@creator, @type, etc.
 
If you go to:
  http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes/
you will see that we currently have nearly 30 taxonomies for things 
like Colorspace, Genre, Of Interest To (ie Audience), Provider, 
Scene, Status, Subject, Topic Type, Videocoder, ...
 
So a news story with even a moderate number of codes will easily 
have 20 or more prefix declarations.  If we assume an average size 
of 50 bytes, that makes 1,000 bytes of prefix declarations.  And 
this is probably quite a conservative estimate.
 
As we are very concerned about bandwidth, we have been thinking of 
allowing the use of XInclude to place the prefix declarations 
outside of the news story.  Now we think (possibly wrongly) that 
XInclude may not permit the inclusion of arbitrary snippets of 
text, at any point in the XML document, eg the inclusion of the 
string:
 
  xmlns:nc="http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes#"
 
at the point shown with "^" below:
 
  <news:item  >
             ^
Having skimmed the (quite dense) XInclude spec, we're still not 
quite sure.
 
Prior to seeing the CURIE Note, we had decided to borrow a prefix 
declaration syntax from Schematron, eg (these are made-up examples):
 
  <ns prefix="nc" uri="http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes#"/>
  <ns prefix="lang" uri="http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/bcp/bcp47.txt#"/>
  <ns prefix="curr" uri="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217#"/>
 
We believe that XInclude would not get indigestion when presented 
with the above.
 
Any comments on the above would be very much appreciated.
 
Thanks,
Misha


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Received on Wednesday, 26 October 2005 05:36:08 UTC