Re: Comments on PR-rdfa-syntax-20080904

Danny Ayers wrote:

> > The primer is aimed mainly at authors, whilst this document is aimed
> > primarily at implementers. The general feeling is that the RDFa spec
> > should be self-contained, and provide everything that an implementer
> > needs to produce an XHTML+RDFa processor.
>
> Reasonable aim.

For what it's worth, I think the syntax document does fulfil that  
aim. Juts using the syntax document and test cases as my guide, I've  
been able to produce a mostly compliant implementation. (The majority  
of my non-compliance issues are whitespace and XMLLiteral stuff,  
which I do hope to fix eventually, but not at a high priority.)

> I don't see any problem with X triples generated by the RDFa processor
> and Y triples generated by the GRDDL processor being analyzed
> separately for conformance purposes, yet both being part of the graph
> expressed by the document. If this doesn't convince you, I'll do my
> best to make the case better.


For what it's worth, in Cognition although the RDFa *module* produces  
only the triples specified in the syntax doc, various other modules  
(for GRDDL, microformats, document structure, eRDF, etc) produce  
other triples and they all go into the same triple store. You can't  
then retrieve a specific graph of just the RDFa triples, or just the  
GRDDL triples. (Though when you run it, you can pass command-line  
options to disable and enable modules, so you could disable all  
modules except RDFa, and get just the RDFa triples that way.)

> > The general point is that as we refined the spec, we always ensured
> > that nothing we did would jeopardise the consistent use of the same
> > rules in other markup languages.
>
> XML markup, even HTML5...but httpd log files?


It's a bit of a stretch to call httpd log files "markup", isn't it?

RDFa can be applied to any markup language that provides a tree-like  
node structure such that each node can take named string properties  
akin to HTML/XML attributes. That could be XML or HTML, but also  
JSON, in-memory C data structures, appropriately structured SQL  
database tables and so forth. (I'm half tempted to implement an RDFa  
parser for JSON as proof-of-concept.)

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2008 07:47:37 UTC