Re: RDF/A Syntax: comments on 27 October 2005 version

Christian,

Thanks for your detailed comments, and Happy New Year!

I've added your email to our list of current issues:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2005-current-issues

Everything you bring up seems to be bugs or imprecise statements on  
our end.

I'll specifically answer the following points since they require more  
explanation than simply fixing our bugs:

> I've read the 27 October 2005 draft of RDF/A Syntax and do have the  
> following technical comments. Also, are there any patent statements  
> in relation  to this technology, and what reference implementations  
> are available?

No patent statements so far, but thanks for bringing it up, we'll  
discuss at our next telecon.

We're working on a reference implementation and will post to the  
mailing list when it's available.

> #2
> section 2.4: How should abiguities between CURIEs and URIs been  
> resolved within the scope of this specification? The XML sniplet in  
> section 2.4 suggests that CURIEs appear in square brackets, but  
> e.g. the 5th sniplet in section 3.1 has no such brackets. There are  
> also cases (e.g. last sniplet in section 5.2 which contain  
> unbracketed URIs with colons which must not be resolved as CURIEs.  
> With this mixed conventions it would appear that a resolution  
> mechanism for RDF/A has to have knowledge about "common" schema  
> names (such as mailto), which seems undesirable. A better  
> alternative may be to require that all CURIEs be bracketed.

This is also a bug, thanks for pointing it out.

CURIE-only attributes are not bracketed, while mixed CURIE/URI  
attributes are always bracketed. The inconsistency reflects a  
discussion that was not resolved at the time of the document: should  
REL, REV, and PROPERTY be CURIE-only, or CURIE/URI mixed? Our current  
thinking is CURIE-only, thus there would be no need for brackets in  
REL,REV,PROPERTY attributes.

The latest RDF/A Primer is more consistent on that front, but of  
course, we need to fix the syntax document, too.

-Ben