Re: [RDFa] ISSUE-29: mime type of RDFa document

Ben Adida wrote:
> 
> Issue #29:
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/29
> 
> What should the MIME type of an RDFa document be? Proposal: whatever the
> MIME type of the host document is. In the case of XHTML1.1+RDFa,
> application/xhtml+xml. If/when RDFa becomes a valid extension for other
> versions of HTML, then it will take on whatever MIME type they accept.
> 
> Thoughts? Questions? Please answer, no matter what you think :)

+cc TimBL and DanC here, picking up from an IRC discussion a few days 
ago. I was asking just this. Well actually I was asking about meaning of 
refs like http://example.com/danbri#me if /danbri is an RDFa HTML 
document. There is a tradition in the HTML world of #blah referencing a 
document section, and in the RDF world (with a lot of push from Tim) for 
#blah to be something that can name real-world (non-informational) 
resources. The general understanding is that mimetypes are the thing 
that establishes the interpretation of #. And so the answer to this 
question will shape whether people can address into the non-info world 
by pointing to #blahblah within an RDFa doc.

For very concrete example, imagine this as RDFa in a <head> section:

     <link rel="foaf:primaryTopic" href="#thething-itself" />

And then later in the page contents:

  <div about="#thething-itself">
       <p property="xyz:abc">

...on the assumption that the xyz:abc property was supposed to be about 
the realworld main topic of the page (maybe a person, a movie, a museum 
artifact, etc).

On my understanding there are some interactions between this style of 
RDFa and the existing conventions for text/html and 
application/xhtml+xml. Do we lose the RDF/XML idiom of using #blah to 
refer to the external world, then? Is this a big loss?

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 19 June 2007 00:49:34 UTC