Feature request for RDFa 1.1 [Fwd: rdf:Lists in RDFa?]

Justification:

> Yes, rdf:Lists are truly horrible in RDFa. In fairness to RDFa,  
> they're just a very complex structure and are horrible in a lot of  
> RDF serialisations - N-Triples, TriX, RDF/JSON, etc. The only  
> serialisations where they seem reasonable are those that provide  
> syntactic sugar to handle them - e.g. Turtle and RDF/XML.


The following language in a future spec would make marking up lists  
in RDFa much easier:

"""
RDFa 1.1 processors MUST handle the property rdfs:member specially.  
If the subject of a triple with predicate rdfs:member is known to be  
an rdf:List, then the processor MUST add appropriate rdf:first,  
rdf:rest, and rdf:nil triples to assemble the list. If the subject of  
a triple with predicate rdfs:member is known to be a rdf:Bag, rdf:Alt  
or rdf:Seq, then the processor MUST add appropriate rdf:_1, rdf:_2,  
etc triples.

"Known to be" = RDFa processors MUST recognise the explicit container  
types rdf:List, rdf:Bag, rdf:Alt and rdf:Seq. RDFa processors MAY  
implement RDFS, OWL or other reasoning to determine that other  
resources may be containers.
"""

There are of course other ways this could be handled - via an  
additional attribute for instance, or by triggering particular  
behaviours based on <ol>/<ul> elements. (Though the latter has the  
disadvantage of not translating to non-(X)HTML languages very  
easily.) I'm not wedded to the solution above, but I'd like to see  
better rdf:List support in RDFa 1.1.

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

Received on Saturday, 5 September 2009 15:40:56 UTC