More on the 'legacy' namespacing question

Hi Ivan,

I was just reading this:

  <http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/2007/08/automated_rdfa_output_from_dit.html>

from Bob du Charme. In it he makes the point that it's very easy to
change your server-side generation code from generating this:

  <meta name="DC.Title" content="My Topic" />

to generating this:

  <meta property="dc:title" content="My Topic" />

I was about to fire off an email pointing out that you can actually
use @name as well, and then it occurred to me that perhaps we should
actually _exclude_ @name from our processing. In other words, rather
than being indifferent about this we would say it doesn't actually
work:

  <meta name="dc:title" content="My Topic" />

By doing this we can keep @name 'unpolluted' with new stuff, and when
we see it we can be sure that it contains legacy values. We therefore
create two possible scenarios, which may prove useful.

The first is that Bob's server-side code could actually generate this, instead:

  <meta name="DC.Title" property="dc:title" content="My Topic" />

Since he is in control of what his server is generating, he might
choose to target both RDFa parsers (with @property) and existing HTML
processors like search-engine crawlers, with @name. This might be
particularly useful if the <meta> property is something that a
search-engine might make use of, but the value is something that we
want to use in an RDFa processor, like this:

  <meta name="description" property="dc:description" content="My description" />

The second scenario is that our hGRDDL rules can be more focused--at
least in relation to the <head> of the document. If the pre-processor
were to detect certain values in @name, then all it has to do is add a
'property' attribute to the element, containing a more RDF-friendly
value, and which will be picked up by the RDFa processor. If a
'property' attribute already exists then the pre-processor need do
nothing.

By explicitly confining the 'legacy' problem to the one attribute--or
at least a large chunk of the legacy problem--we might find this issue
easier to manage; we'll probably find it easier to define the
'mapping' rules.

Any thoughts on that?

Regards,

Mark

-- 
  Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer

  mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
  http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com

  standards. innovation.

Received on Friday, 31 August 2007 14:06:21 UTC