[RDFa] The CLASS attribute

Hi all,

(also following up from our telecon)

So we have agreed to use the CLASS attribute as syntactic sugar for
rdf:type. That works really nicely in all of our examples, but it
creates a lot of "local triples" in your average HTML. I know we've
argued many times that it doesn't matter in terms of machine processing,
but the point is that this is a really bad unexpected outcome for many
users, including TimBL.

So I have a proposal: we keep using CLASS, but RDFa provides triples
only for namespaced CLASSes. I know we've talked about just "turning off
local triples" in the parser as a way to get over the bad first
impression that people have, but I think we need to go further than
that: TimBL pointed to an example that can really get confusing:

<div class="notice" about="#me">
blah blah blah
</div>

gives:

<#me> rdf:type notice

No matter how you look at it, that's semantically wrong.

We need to make sure that only explicit classes become types, and the
easiest way to do that is to require scoped classes.

Thoughts?

-Ben

Received on Tuesday, 13 February 2007 20:06:42 UTC