Re: [RDFa] rdf:XMLLiteral (was RE: Missing issue on the list: identification of RDFa content)

Mark Birbeck wrote:
> Hi Elias/Ian,
> 
> I'm afraid I'm missing from this discussion, first what we *lose* by
> using rdf:XMLLiteral, and second, some clear-cut explanation of why
> plain literals are *logically* the correct default, rather than just
> simply someone's 'preference'.
> 
[snip]
> 
> ... The whole idea of RDFa is to allow authors to add
> minimal mark-up to their documents to create RDF, almost without
> thinking about it, since the result is a whole load of lovely triples
> for the 'RDF community' to process...so ease of authoring is a
> fundamental design goal [snip]
> 

Personally, I think (not sure if logically or emotionally [which
unfortunately cannot completely separated]) your statement above should
be the main driver on this issue. I'm really glad we are not discussing
to take away either plain literals or XMLLiterals, we are simply trying
to decide which is the best default for the authors.

Let me try a logical benefit in my opinion of defaulting to plain
literals. Let's do a survey of *all* of the ontologies and RDF schemas
we can possibly find and let's see how many rdf:XMLLiteral datatypes are
found in them. If XMLLiterals win, then I think that should be the
default, else plain literals should be. Is this logical?

You mention "almost without thinking about it". As much I'd like that to
be the case, it's just not going to be "intuitive" to author RDFa w/o
having a good grasp on graphs and RDF to write the least number of about
attributes to fully exploit our subject resolution mechanisms. In my
discussions with people about RDFa, I get a lot of push back in the
form: it's crazy for me to think that the average person will know how
to do this. In defense, I say the same about microformats, but that
doesn't help us. In the end, we end up agreeing that most of the RDFa
will be based on applications that have data in databases and output
(X)HTML. Now if you think about it, how many systems allow mark-up in
their fields? If a system does, then template should rdf:XMLLiteral as
the content type, else it will most likely be a plain literal or some
other datatyped literal.

-Elias

Received on Monday, 19 March 2007 00:19:18 UTC