Editorial comments on RDFa 1.1 Core (Re: Editor's Drafts Updated)

Shane,

My first reaction on this is: wow:-) This is great.

I have gone through the RDFa Core document. I have a bunch of comments, both editorial and somewhat less editorial, but none of these reduce the wow:-)

As for the FPWD publication, I think there are two issues that we could try to settle by the WG before publishing and then incorporate it in the document.

- settling ISSUE 13 on the empty @typeof. It is a small thing, but affects the readability of some of the examples in the document (see below)

- settling ISSUE 14 (ie, a @prefix declaration). The FPWD is a stake in the ground, so to say, and it is important to send out the right messages; if we accept to have @prefix, then this should be part of the FPWD.

Shane, I will add the editorial comments in this mail, and I will also send out separate mails for issues that might be a bit more substantial and may need WG discussions. That is better to control the threads...

---------- Editorial comments on RDFa 1.1. Core

- For obvious reasons, there is still much emphasis on (X)HTML in the core document. All the examples are in XHTML, the informative parts refer to XHTML for, say, the explanation of the @rel attribute, etc. It is perfectly o.k. to have some XHTML examples, but it would be good to exchange others to other XML dialects. We can either use a phony XML, we could use SVG, ODF, etc.

(This is not necessarily for the FPWD, though an editorial note on that effect might be good)

- I wonder whether we should keep such an extended example section as 2.2. It is the plan of the WG to publish an RDFa cookbook and also to have a new primer version; I wonder whether it is not better to move at least part of the examples there, resulting in a more succinct spec.

Similarly, much of section 3 could be shortened in favour of the cookbook and primer; it reads like a tutorial on rdf, triples, uri-s...

- In the namespace list (section 2) "http://www.w3.org/ns/rdfa#>" should be "http://www.w3.org/ns/rdfa#"

- The example for the @profile document (http://www.example.org/vocab-rdf-dc.html, end of Section 2.2) includes explicit values for the @typeof, and that was related to the issue of @typeof="". If the WG decide to remove that restriction (issue 13), then we should simply have @typeof="" in all three places in the example and the comment underneath should be removed. The same holds for the http://www.example.org/vocab-foaf-terms.html example.

Note that the latter is currently wrong, the second _:a should be _:b... (my mistake:-(

- Section 2.2, There are some leftover <span> in the example code for @profile generating triples:

<span class='sh_keyword'>@prefix</span> rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>

- My understanding is that safe curies become almost unnecessary, and we keep them for backward compatibility only. This means that we should probably not use them in examples like in 6.4...

- In section 7, there is a sentence "However, if some approach other than the DOM traversal technique defined here is used, it is important to ensure that any meta or link elements processed in the head of the document honor any occurrences of base which may appear after those elements. (In other words, HTML processing rules must still be applied, even if document processing takes place in a non-HTML environment such as a search indexer.)"

I think this should be removed from RDFa Core and moved to RDFa XHTML

- There is a reference to head and body in Section 7 on processing steps. This should be removed from RDFa 1.1 Core and moved to XHTML

- I am not sure I understand the typesetting approach in the first bullet list in section 7. List of URI Mapping is bold, the others are underlined (links)...

- The Acknowledgement appendix should list members if this WG:-)

Other mails to follow!

Cheers

Ivan






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Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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