- From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@x-port.net>
- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:00:42 +0100
- To: "Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com>
- Cc: "Ivan Herman" <ivan@w3.org>, "Elias Torres" <elias@torrez.us>, "Semantic Web" <semantic-web@w3.org>, "W3C RDFa task force" <public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>, office-metadata <office-metadata@lists.oasis-open.org>
Hi Bruce, You wrote: > > It will be interesting to see if the two standards organisations can > > rise to the challenge. > > It would have been even more "interesting" if the W3C in general... I certainly agree with you there, but I'm only an invited expert at the W3C--you'd have to talk to coordinators and group chairs about that one. :) > ... and you > in particular had shown some interest in this work 18 months ago (when > the ODF Metadata Subcommittee was first created). I've regularly been > posting notes about this work here, without apparent interest. That's fair enough. However, although I do read as many lists as I can--because I'm involved in a lot of different W3C specifications--I only actually subscribed to the 'semantic web' list a week or so ago, so I'm afraid I have no idea that these discussions were going on. I don't know if other people on the taskforce did, and if so, it is very unfortunate that it wasn't raised in our telecons. > Elias > says he did similar with the RDFa group. Yes, I saw that in Elias' other email; I can't find any reference to this in any of the taskforce minutes though. I would have expected to see some direct questions on issues like namespaced attributes--which I can see appears in the minutes of your discussion even last year--or requests for reviews of the ideas. Also, I've searched through my email archives and I can't see any email that asks me directly for my input. :( It would be quite annoying if it turns out that some email has gone astray. > So I'm a little disappointed in your suggestion that we've gone wrong > here, and that the complaint comes AFTER we've done all the work. Yes...definitely. I absolutely understand that. Although maybe we should console ourselves by saying 'better this year, than next'. ;) > Anyway, I'm going to try to figure out among our group a suggestion of > how we might put our head's together. I think adopting RDFa as is would > be a non-starter ATM for the reasons Elias and I mentioned. But my sense > is we could look to align the attribute names (are they now stable on > your end??) and you might consider creating a namespaced set of > attributes for inclusion in XML languages that need that (like ODF). > That way we could at least at some point declare the ODF in-line > metadata attributes a proper subset of RDFa. That sounds like a good way to proceed. The question of having namespaced attributes is something that myself, Shane and Steven have done a lot in other specs we've worked on; XML Events and @role, for example, have a feature that allows the attributes to be imported into other, non-XHTML, languages, and I _think_ that would meet your needs. (Although I don't want to be too presumptuous, here.) As to being a subset, I think it would be fantastic. Certainly, in terms of a generic parser it would make no difference at all if, for example, the subject, predicate and object always appeared on the same element, or if there were certain attributes that simply never appeared. Regards, Mark -- Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232 http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com standards. innovation.
Received on Monday, 15 October 2007 16:07:22 UTC