Re: GRDDL profile for RDF-A

Keith Alexander wrote:
> I apologise for making my first post to this list one of dissent, 

I, for one, found it a positive contribution rather than a negative one!

There is a mismatch between somewhat different sets of expectations 
around extensibility:

One group want things to be easy for them to add extensions (e.g. 
microformats or RDFa).

Another group (typically the standards people) want multiple extensions 
to be able to work together.

The second group hence want explicitness about which extensions are 
being added. This tends to require at least one URI pointing off to some 
definition of the extension. This requires work from someone defining an 
extension:
- they need to choose a URI
- they need to include that URI whenever they use the extension
- they need to provide some content at that URI that defines the extension

The problem is made worse because there are few usable standards for 
'defining extensions' which, in part, is where GRDDL comes in.

RDFa, in a way, may sidestep the need to have a URI defining it, by 
being included in some version of (X)HTML.

Without having some means for defining extensions then sooner or later 
there will be a name clash between Alice's extension and Bob's, and the 
end-user will have to guess which extension is being used; and it won't 
be possible to use the extensions together - in particular, it won't be 
possible to copy from a page using Alice's extension and paste into a 
page using Bob's.

Rather than doing away with @profile, this seems to argue more for 
allowing @profile anywhere, with the semantics that this extension is 
being used in this element and its children. This will of course be an 
unwelcome proposal to people who don't like using too many URIs.

Jeremy




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Received on Thursday, 24 May 2007 11:51:01 UTC