Re: RDFa test suite addition

Mark Birbeck wrote:
> That's fine, and simply 'appending' will work in this situation,
> provided -- as you say -- that you append to the correct part of the
> base URL.

Right, I didn't mean to imply that 'appending' will work in all cases
(even though I'm not convinced that the statement is not true).

What you have said has got me wondering about what is correct,
acceptable and incorrect, however.

> But we also need to ensure that the same triples are generated by this:
> 
>   <div about="#sneaking-sally">
>     <a rel="media:download" href="../../live/sneaking_sally.mp3">Live
> Recording</a>
>   </div>
> 
> The sample document you gave is in the directory "/fuzzbot/demo", so
> "../../live" should be the same as "/live". However, even if you
> 'append to the right part', the resulting URL is wrong:
> 
>   <http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/demo/../../live/sneaking_sally.mp3>

I realize that the URL above is not optimal, but is it "wrong"? RFC-1738
says that the URL is valid (if I'm reading the RFC correctly):

ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1738.txt

Is it the RDFa parser's job to normalize URLs? I can certainly see the
argument for why it should tidy up URLs, but I don't think this is a MUST.

If it's not a MUST, then we find ourselves in a position where the
application/inference engine MUST normalize the URLs coming in from the
RDFa parser.

Take this CURIE as an example:

<span xmlns:ex="http://example.org/2008-10-24/docs/api/"
      about="[ex:../ref/a.html]">...</span>

a bit contrived, but would you say that the parser should output this URI:

http://example.org/2008-10-24/docs/api/../ref/a.html

or this one:

http://example.org/2008-10-24/docs/ref/a.html

If our argument is that CURIEs are simple concatenations, at what point
in the process is the "strange URL" converted into the "normalized URL"?

If we do think it should be the parser that normalizes URLs, we don't
have such a statement in the RDFa Syntax document, do we?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.0 Website Launches
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/07/03/bitmunk-3-website-launches

Received on Tuesday, 29 July 2008 00:09:08 UTC