Re: the Creative Commons take on @href everywhere

Mark,

I'm open to changing my opinion *back* to no @href everywhere, but I'm
not sure that this convinces me... because I think this can be resolved
with an existing TAG decision:

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#httpRange-14

Basically, if you get a 303 when you de-reference the URI, then the URI
can be a non-information resource. In other words, say you have the markup:

<a rel="foaf:knows" href="http://www.ivan-herman.net/ivan">Ivan</a>

but you want http://www.ivan-herman.net/ivan to be "Ivan", then you have
ivan-herman.net issue a 303 redirect to
http://www.ivan-herman.net/ivan-foaf.rdf, which describes the URI /ivan.

Clicking through still works, and the URI is a non-information resource.

Sure, people will make "mistakes" and point directly to information
resources they intend to be "Ivan". But that's going to happen no matter
what we do.

In other words: is this really RDFa's problem?

-Ben

Mark Birbeck wrote:
> Hi Ben,
> 
> :)
> 
> Ok...that's good news...I think. But we have some problems, and they
> are not of our own making.
> 
> During the course of doing research to try to find a compromise for
> this issue, I realised that we had no way of marking up objects that
> are not information resources.
> 
> Take this example:
> 
>  <span rel="foaf:knows" href="http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf">
>    ...
>  </span>
> 
> The document being referred to here is an RDF/XML document, so to all
> intents and purposes the fact that it is a document can be ignored.
> (I.e., you cannot make any statements about this document, since the
> moment you talk about 'creation date', for example, you are talking
> about Ivan's birthday.)
> 
> Nothing wrong so far, we say. Since the @href doesn't appear on an <a>
> then it wouldn't be legitimate to interpret the end-point as an
> information resource. But what about when XHTML 2 makes all @hrefs
> navigable? A precise interpretation of the mark-up (from an RDF
> standpoint) would be this:
> 
>  <> foaf:knows <http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf> .
>  <http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf> rdf:type foaf:Document .
> 
> I know that we can't impose this interpretation, because it uses FOAF,
> but I'm merely using the syntax as a shorthand to indicate that if
> @href is navigable, then the end-point is by definition an information
> resource.
> 
> The way out of this seems to me to make @resource available, so that
> the small number of people who really want to create a reference to a
> resource that is not an information resource can do so. I would also
> prefer that we don't make @href available everywhere since I'm
> increasingly coming to the conclusion that RDFa should have as little
> impact on the syntax of the host language as possible.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mark
> 
> On 27/06/07, Ben Adida <ben@adida.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I looked into what CC's CTO and ex-CTO think of @href everywhere
>> situation, given that CC's current licensing engine hands out RDFa that
>> includes @href on a SPAN. It turns out that my intuition was very off:
>>
>> 1) they don't think @href on a SPAN implies "clickable"
>>
>> 2) if XHTML2 makes @href navigable in some way, they see this is a
>> significant plus.
>>
>> As a result of this user feedback, I am changing my position on this
>> issue. @href everywhere works for me. There remains a question as to
>> whether we need @resource, but I am inclined to say we do not need it in
>> XHTML1.1+RDFa, at this point.
>>
>> Steven and Mark, I appreciate your insisting on your point of view here,
>>  because it pushed me to look into this more deeply and get more
>> concrete user feedback.
>>
>> Fire away!
>>
>> -Ben
>>
>>
>>
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 28 June 2007 14:32:33 UTC