Re: Why bound prefixes are an anti-pattern in language design

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Martin McEvoy wrote:
>
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#selecting-names-when-defining-vocabularies
> 
> I must have missed it ;) still reverse DNS identifiers are not really 
> people friendly, and make your markup very bulky, I think microdata 
> should have not included them, but that's my personal taste I guess.

I feel the same way about URIs. :-)

That's why I included both; that way people who like one can use that, and 
people who like the other can use that too.


> Some examples:
> 
> Here is a page marked up with HTML5 microdata:
> http://getsemantic.info/test/dataset.html

(Note that this uses unregistered terms, so it is invalid. Unless you use 
one of the predefined vocabularies, all identifiers should have either a 
"." or a ":" in it.)

This example (with its external indirections) is a great example of the 
problem. What happens if someone copies the body of your document but 
doesn't realise the <link> is relevant? This kind of thing _will_ happen 
on the Web. It happens all the time. This is one reason prefixes are so 
bad, and it affects that kind of declaration mechanism also.


> The big long strings ie: org.example.animal.cat and org.example.name, ok 
> they are not "particularly" long strings but I can see authors writing 
> things like com.example.tag.cat# there is no real difference in what I 
> stated above, its a good idea I think to drop reverse DNS from the HTML5 
> spec, there is really no need for it to be there, if you do I expect 
> people will warm to microdata a lot more.

I don't understand what you mean.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 11 August 2009 22:36:08 UTC