Re: Comments on PR-rdfa-syntax-20080904

Mark,

Although you said your response wasn't formal, Toby's response that
he's been able to work with the spec as it stands shifts my position
significantly. (I'll argue "there exists a well-informed developer"
vs. "for all PHP scripters" over a beer sometime :-)

Hence I formally withdraw all my criticisms, bar two^H^H^H one:

>>> * 4.3. RDFa Processor Conformance *
>>>
>>> "A conforming RDFa Processor MAY make available additional triples that have
>>> been generated using rules not described here, but these triples MUST NOT be
>>> made available in the [default graph]. (Whether these additional triples are
>>> made available in one or more additional [RDF graph]s is
>>> implementation-specific, and therefore not defined here.)"

I strongly recommend rewording this to something like:

>>> "A conforming RDFa Processor MAY make available additional triples that have
>>> been generated using rules not described here, but these triples MUST NOT be
>>> made available in the [RDFa-derived graph]. (Whether these additional triples are
>>> made available in the same or additional [RDF graph]s is not defined here.)"

Maybe not the perfect wording, but for a set of html2rdf document
processors to only get the RDFa interpretation is *broken*.

Say I have a document that only has GRDDL-accessible triples, and an
RDFa processor gets there first, the result would be one empty
"default graph", plus some auxiliary implementation-specific triples,
without any unambiguous connection to the document from which they
were derived. My interpretation of the RDF-in-HTML efforts is to
maximise the explicit data available from the document, not leave it
to the consumer's fortune.

My other substantive objection is (quoting you rather than the spec):

"I don't think it is true that an author needs to understand RDFa."

I have a fundamental disagreement on that statement, but in the
informative context it appears in the spec I don't think it makes much
difference - so kindly ignore :-)

btw, my use of language like "gives me the impression of seeming
messy" is that of someone who's effectively overlooking the spec as a
whole afresh, rather than having being concentrating on the minutiae
for a long while. And too wimpy to say "that sucks" ;-)

Cheers,
Danny.

Received on Monday, 15 September 2008 00:44:07 UTC