Re: Late, but I have reservations.

--- On Wed, 7/23/08, Ben Adida <ben@adida.net> wrote:

> As Toby mentioned, this is not an incompatibility with DC,
> it's simply a 
> different way to express metadata. In addition, if I
> remember correctly, 
> Dublin Core is considering changing their XHTML
> recommendation to use RDFa.

> 
> Regarding GRDDL, I don't think your comment makes
> sense: GRDDL is a 
> generic transformation mechanism.


DC uses "object notation", e.g. dc.title rather than dc:title, and GRDDL uses this (carefully - generic does not mean without rules) to get name-space bindings.  It would surprise me if the DC was considering the use of the attributes added with RDFa.  They simply don't need them.  Toby's example: <title property="dc:title" ...> could as easily be a #FIXED attribute in a DTD - it is always true.  <title instanceof="dc:subject" ... might be a bit more interesting, but still there are ways to do this that computers already understand very well.  <link rel="stylesheet" and <link rel="alternative" ... talk to your browser, not your friends.

> Less clarity for whom? There exist plenty of mechanisms for
> expressing 
> human-invisible metadata already. <link
> rel="alternate"> is one of them. 
> Or simply publishing RDF/XML.

Variety in modes of communication is wasted on computers (<head>), but beloved by humans (<body>).

> In general, I think your interpretation of RDFa is
> confused. RDFa is 
> about expressing structure for data that is already being
> published as 
> HTML. There cannot be any deep privacy or policy
> implications to RDFa, 
> since the expression of the raw data can already be done
> using existing 
> technology. RDFa only helps to connect the human-readable
> to the 
> machine-readable. If a publisher wishes to keep those two
> far apart, 
> then there are many other ways to accomplish this than
> RDFa.

So, the gun wasn't smoking when you sold it?  Anyone who caches your personal information forever is not your friend. Although you can't easily stop them, you can't "vision statement" away the problem either.  An RDF inference engine with access to years of your writings needs an IGNORE command of some sort.

--Gannon

Received on Friday, 25 July 2008 22:50:56 UTC