Re: RDFa Last Call Comment: Better name than 'instanceof' is needed

Hi Ben,

I can understand you had a long and public discussion, but last call is a 
time for review from a *wider* public.

I understand that rdftype was rejected because it pushed RDF too much and 
we don't want web authors to have to think too much about the type info as 
being distinct from just plain doing XHTML.

I also understand that things like class, type and role are already taken 
and overloading them would be quite bad. 

But one problem pointed out in my LC comment is that instanceof is 
*almost* taken by XForms.  You would be overriding the concept if not the 
exact spelling of an attribute name.  For example XForms has an attribute 
called "instance".

A second problem described in my LC comment is that you don't seem to be 
creating an instance of the rdf type given by "instanceof".  A <div> isn't 
a cal:Vevent. 

My LC comment is not required to present a full solution, and though I 
asked that you come up with a name that better reflects what is happening, 
it occurs to me that a better name for what you are doing is "extends". It 
is a single word attribute, it avoids the name conflict with XForms, and 
it more accurately characterizes the fact that a <div> extends a 
cal:Vevent by adding div-ness, but that the div now takes cal:Vevent as 
its basis.  It would look like this:

   <div extends="cal:Vevent">
      <span property="cal:dtstart"> ... </span>
      ...
   </div>

Because we're doing markup here, the name "implements" would seem to work 
too, in a declarative sense, and may even imply slightly more openness to 
those who might know those words from another context.

Cheers,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
Senior Technical Staff Member
Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
Blog RSS feed: 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/rss/JohnBoyer?flavor=rssdw





Ben Adida <ben@adida.net> 
03/18/2008 09:47 AM

To
John Boyer/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA
cc
Micah Dubinko <mdubinko@yahoo-inc.com>, public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org
Subject
Re: RDFa Last Call Comment: Better name than 'instanceof' is needed






John Boyer wrote:
> 
> But could you explain why the spelling "instanceof" is mandatory?

You mean why we chose @instanceof specifically? We went through a long 
(and public) discussion about this. @rdftype was brought up and 
rejected. Ideally, we would have used @type, but that was taken. And our 
previous overloading of @class made a few people quite upset.

I didn't meant to ignore your comment, by the way, I only meant to wait 
until the task force members express an opinion on the Thursday call. I 
responded to Micah's comment because I could do that immediately without 
consulting the group.

We'll chat about it on Thursday and get back to you.

-Ben