Re: ISSUE-116: Last Call Comment: use CURIE prefix other than xmlns for future HTML compatibility

Hi Al,

This is an official response to an RDFa Last Call comment[1], tracked as
ISSUE-116[2], that you sent on April 3rd, 2008 on behalf of PFWG. We
considered the comment on April 24th and resolved the issue on the call
last week.

There were 3 sub-issues identified in the main issue in a prior e-mail
by Ralph Swick[3]. A response to each part is given below.

The first statement noted that the RDFa Syntax and Processing document
does not address RDFa in HTML. This is true, defining the use of RDFa in
non-XHTML documents is outside of the scope of the current RDFa Syntax
and Processing document. The current RDFa Syntax and Processing document
only addresses the use of RDF in XHTML.

The second statement noted that the method of specifying CURIE prefixes
would most likely have to be rewritten for HTML documents. This is also
true, and is anticipated[4] in the current CURIE specification.

The third question asked whether we had considered approaches that would
allow RDFa in both HTML and XHTML documents. While compatible HTML/XHTML
approaches have been discussed over the lifespan of the workgroup we
must design first and foremost to our host language, which is XHTML.

XHTML has a mechanism that does exactly what we need for creating
(prefix, URI) pairs and that mechanism is supported by existing DOM
implementations.

We believe that RDFa deployment will be better supported by leveraging
the existing DOM implementations than by inventing a parallel mechanism
for XHTML that duplicates @xmlns for RDFa version 1.

We note that any proposal for a parallel mechanism to @xmlns would have
to consider proposals for changing behaviours such as the inheritance
rules that @xmlns specifies. The group does not feel that this would be
a brief discussion.

The current resolution does not require any changes to the RDFa Syntax
and Processing Document. Please let us know if this resolution works for
you and the rest of PFWG.

-- manu

[1]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2008Apr/0031.html
[2]http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/116
[3]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2008Apr/0115.html
[4]http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-curie-20080402/#s_syntax

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: RDFa Basics in 8 minutes (video)
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/01/07/rdfa-basics/

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 15:25:11 UTC