New RDFa Primer Draft

Hi all,

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2006-04-24-rdfa-primer

is the current draft of the RDFa Primer. Yes, I'm trying "RDFa" on  
for size :)

The usual disclaimer applies: this document has no formal standing  
within W3C and is subject change at any time.

Important changes to note:

1) the Abstract is new.

2) Section 2 is entirely rewritten, thanks to a very productive  
offline discussion with MarkB (and a suggestion due also to DanC). In  
particular, we stay away from the URI ambiguity issues by using  
vocabularies (iCal and vCard) that are less people-oriented. This  
also seems like the right way to show people the power of RDFa: there  
are interesting, natural things to share in current web pages, like  
events and contact information, that RDFa can address quite well.

3) Section 3 and 4 are mostly unchanged, except for the dc:creator  
issue. From looking at the Dublin Core documentation, it seems that  
dc:creator should be a literal. So I made it a literal, and changed  
rel="dc:creator" to property="dc:creator". Of course, it's currently  
an XMLLiteral, so there may be some remaining issue to address here.

Note that I have *not* addressed Alistair's comment that a XHTML  
fragment cannot also be a physical resource. Like Mark, Jeremy, and  
Pat, I believe an XHTML fragment *can* also be a camera or a person.  
I'm sure we'll face opposition on this problem, but this goes to the  
core of whether XHTML can be a first-class serialization of RDF.

If it can't, it seems to me that the Semantic Web and the Clickable  
Web are hopelessly disjoint, and we've got a problem bigger than this  
task force.

4) Section 5 (and eventually additional sections) will dig into  
specific vocabularies, like FOAF, geoURL, etc... for readers who are  
particularly interested in these specific vocabularies. So far,  
they're not written up, and will likely be written up in WD #3 (next  
WG....)

Note that I have not had time to address all comments by reviewers.  
I'm going to try to do that over the next 2-3 days. If you catch  
something specific, let me know ASAP.

-Ben

Received on Saturday, 22 April 2006 16:14:30 UTC