Re: Comments on "RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing"

On Jun 12, 2008, at 1:07 PM, Ben Adida wrote:

> Jonathan,
>
> We resolved ISSUE-103 a couple of weeks ago, but I realize we  
> forgot to ask you to comment on our response. We rejected your  
> comment, with the following explanation:
>
> "CURIEs are not URI schemes, they are a macro expansion mechanism.  
> No need to change the Syntax document. CURIEs are also QName-like,  
> allowing legacy languages to migrate forward cleanly."
>
> If you can let us know whether our response is acceptable to you,  
> that would be great. Thanks!
>
> -Ben

I understand you are way past being able to take any nontrivial  
suggestions, so I'm not sure how what I say can matter.

My answer is no, it is not acceptable, as I don't feel whoever  
replied paid attention to what I said. I was not talking about  
CURIEs; I was talking about the syntactic category URIorSafeCURIE  
(which I am very glad to see you renamed - thank you). I had four sub- 
points and these were not addressed, and it sounds like the  
comparison between [...] and a URI scheme was taken seriously.

If you had said, we're too late in the process to think about  
anything like this, which I suspect is the true answer, that would  
have been better.

Looking back - there was a probably a time, before I was involved,  
when we might have had an opportunity to do a cleaner architecture,  
one that could grow to be used uniformly throughout future W3C  
recommendations. It might have been based on some radical change such  
as joining the CURIE and URI syntactic categories, thus doing away  
with the CURIE/Safe CURIE distinction which I think is going to be  
confusing to users (it's confusing to me); or if that turned out to  
be nonsense, then some other radical proposition. It is unfortunate  
that what we've ended up with is such a compromise.

Anyhow - not to worry about any of this - there's not a lot of point  
in answering me except over beer. I don't mean my comments to be at  
all hostile. Good work, RDFa will be a big help I think, now let's  
figure out how to use it and spread it.

Best
Jonathan

Received on Thursday, 12 June 2008 20:06:04 UTC