Re: Do the following examples generate any triples?

Hi Ivan,

Shane wrote:
> Well - regardless of what is permitted in XHTML1, by which I assume you
> mean XHTML 1.0, in XHTML + RDFa @href is allowed everywhere, more or
> less.  So as we think about triple generation, we need to keep that in
> mind.

and you replied:
> Really? I thought we decided that would not be the case some point in
> the past (I remember long debates about this) when we introduced
> @resource. The logic being to minimize the differences between XHTML1.0
> and XHTML+RDFa to what is strictly necessary. But I may be wrong.

The debate was indeed about '@href everywhere', and I was the one not
keen on it. But Ben felt strongly that it was the right thing to do,
partly for consistency, and partly because it pointed towards the
future (i.e., XHTML 2, where @href is enabled for use everywhere) and
so the group voted his way. (I wanted to see "he won and I lost", as a
kind of shorthand, but it sounds a bit adversarial. :))

The *re-introduction* of @resource was essentially a way to address
one of my concerns about the use of @href everywhere, which was that
something which was _not_ a clickable link today (for example, @href
on a <div>) would become clickable in the future in the world of XHTML
2. I felt that there were use-cases where you really, really, really,
did not want a clickable link. (An example would be the predicates
around 'online account', in FOAF.)

So @resource allows those who know what they are doing to create
references to resources that are guaranteed to never be navigable (at
least not in the conventional sense), but for most authors, '@href
everywhere' is perfectly sufficient.

Which by the way, shows that any arguments about having 'many ways to
do things' being confusing for authors doesn't really stand up; there
are bound to be many ways to do things in any language, and the key is
which of those to explain to which audience, at which time.
Introducing someone to the distinction between @resource and @href,
when they have no idea about the differences between information
resources and non-information resources, is of course pointless. But
it doesn't mean that we shouldn't have such a distinction, since it's
very useful for those who know...and one day the beginner may come to
find it useful, too.

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 Wednesday, 9 January 2008 13:22:57 UTC