Re: CURIE objections in HTML5+RDFa (was: Re: RDFa and Web Directions North 2009)

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 7:55 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
> On Feb 17, 2009, at 05:40, Manu Sporny wrote:
>
>> The front-runner for how we address the xmlns: issue seems to be
>> @prefix. I believe using @prefix to specify CURIE prefixes will address
>> all of your concerns with XHTML/HTML DOM incompatibilities. Please
>> confirm or reject this assertion (and be specific about what you
>> do/don't like about @prefix).
>
> If @prefix were used as the only mechanism for defining CURIE prefixes (that
> is, xmlns:foo would no longer be used), it would address all my XHTML/HTML
> API consistency concerns. However, it would not address my concerns about
> prefix-based indirection in general.
>
> What I like about @prefix is that the attribute would result in the ["",
> "prefix"] namespace,local pair in both Namespace-aware XML parsing as in
> HTML parsing. More on what I don't like about it below.
>

Can we please pause the great discussion for a moment and note the
places where we have made progress and place some markers to avoid
regression?

I have been watching the discussion from a distance and although come
from a practical perspective like Ben/Mark that we are (for now) able
to parse RDFa today with JavaScript using DOM-level APIs, I was
finally able to appreciate Henri's concern regarding the use of xmlns
in HTML5 for RDFa. In fact, I dealt with this to some extent when
helping Ivan make his XML-based python parser support HTML/x by making
use of html5lib's APIs. I'm also very impressed with Ian's arguments
for improving our use cases and clearly outlining our objectives. I'm
guilty of sometimes thinking that RDFa is wonderful because it's
structured metadata, but fail to justify it.

I think it's clearly from most of the folks involved with RDFa that
we're not at all against using @prefix if it let's us cross this
bridge and it seems that we have two emails from Henri showing
acceptance of something @prefix-like. This is a place where we should
focus some energy until we have clearly definable todos moving
forward.

My $0.02.

-Elias

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 15:39:34 UTC