Re: CURIE objections in HTML5+RDFa

Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>> I'm particularly worried about ccREL succeeding to the point that an
>>> alternative solution can no longer be launched into the market to
>>> replace it and Free Culture then getting encumbered by the syntactic
>>> complexity preventing even further success.
>>
>> Which alternative solution to ccREL are you referring to?
> 
> A hypothetical alternative that isn't being developed because the effort
> is put into ccREL in RDF.

We can't talk about hypothetical solutions since we already have a real
solution on the table. If you want to be persuasive about this, you must
demonstrate a real alternative to the ccREL solution. Weighing a real
solution against a hypothetically better solution is a logical fallacy
known as the Perfect Solution Fallacy[1].

> My point was that short prefixes provide enough space in practice. I
> didn't mean to impose an arbitrary limit to vocabulary designers who
> want a longer prefix.

Noted.

>>> a one-letter URI scheme
>>> (e.g. 'r' for RDF) could be registered adding two characters of overhead
>>> per predicate: "r:prefix-local".
>>> To add back dereferencability in pre-existing software and to use a
>>> pre-existing registry system, a TLD called 'rdf' could be registered and
>>> the identifiers could take the form "http://local.prefix.rdf" with 11
>>> characters of overhead. If a software update for dereferencability is
>>> OK, "r:prefix-local" could be defined as the identifier to compare, but
>>> to dereference it you'd map it to "http://local.prefix.rdf" before
>>> passing it to the HTTP layer.
>>
>> I thought your whole point was to get away from using URIs of any sort?
>> I'm a bit confused at this point, didn't you state that URIs were a bad
>> thing and we shouldn't use them at all?
> 
> Right.
> 
> However, as an elaboration, I outlined a way to make masquarade short
> strings as URIs to avoid disruptive changes to deployed RDF software.

So, is it fair to say that you believe that not creating disruptive
changes to RDF software is a design requirement[2]? Just like not
creating disruptive changes to HTML software is a design requirement for
HTML5?

Feedback was given on your proposal in the last e-mail[3]. I had asked:

"Given this new information, how would you change the proposal you have
outlined above?"

Are you still working on that response? I'm curious to see what you have
come up with in regards to the issues raised in the last e-mail[3].

-- manu

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_solution_fallacy
[2]http://rdfa.info/wiki/rdfa-design-principles
[3]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Feb/0190.html

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Scaling Past 100,000 Concurrent Web Service Requests
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/09/30/scaling-webservices-part-1

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2009 17:59:40 UTC