Re: the Creative Commons take on @href everywhere

Hi Mark,

> Also, the problem with the 303 approach is that you don't know what's
> behind the first URI until you dereference it, which doesn't work very
> well for a parser. If we parse the mark-up and store the first URI
> (http://www.ivan-herman.net/ivan in your example) we now have a set of
> statements that seem to be about a document (information resource),
> and not a person. To work out whether those statements are really
> about a person (in your example, that would be
> http://www.ivan-herman.net/ivan-foaf.rdf) we'd have to de-reference
> every single URI we've obtained, retrieve any URIs in 303 returns, and
> then update our triples. That's very flakey (if the request fails you
> don't know whether it's because you have a non-information resource
> anyway, or if it's because the server is down) and of course it's very
> resource intensive.

So, the problem with the above paragraph is that it is basically a
contradiction of the principles of semweb and RDF, as I understand them.

If you point to a URI, you don't know ahead of time what it might be. It
might even change over time, so you shouldn't declare, as the linker,
that it's an information resource or a non-information resource. What
if, for example, two pages link to a URI, one of them with @resource,
the other with @href? Whom do you trust? You have to trust the server
for that URI, no one else.

So I really don't think this is a reason to introduce a new attribute in
RDFa, because at an architectural level, it's not quite right to imply
that you can declare some property of a foreign resource.

> My suggestion as a way out of this--which is independent of @resource
> v. @href--would be to try to encourage some kind of best practice.

[...]

>  <http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan#me>

Yes, I agree with that.

> Anyway, back to the main issue; all I'm saying is that for those
> authors who *know* what they are linking to, having the ability to use
> the @resource attribute is very useful in *addition* to @href. I.e.,
> it's a way of saying 'I _know_ that the resource that I'm referring to
> is not an information resource'.

Again, just to be clear, the point of RDF and the semweb is that, as the
linker, you *don't* know. Providing a mechanism to express this supposed
knowledge is, to the best of my understanding, wrong.

-Ben

Received on Monday, 9 July 2007 22:31:12 UTC