New Issue: Allowing extension of RDFa Core

(with my PFWG hat on)

Part of the work in the PFWG is the creation of the Role Attribute 
Specification.  This is a simple specification that defines an attribute 
that can be used to clearly identify the (machine interpretable) role of 
an element (e.g., role='banner', role='spinbutton').  A number of roles 
are defined in the XHTML vocabulary, but the role attribute's datatype 
is ( TERM | URIorCURIE )+, and the intention is that this extensible 
attribute can be used with any vocabulary.

Obviously, it would make some sense for @role to be able to generate 
triples that could be used to help find specific roles in resources.  I 
doubt that spinbutton is particularly interesting, but 'definition', 
'contentinfo', and 'main' are probably low hanging fruit for a semantic 
web inference engine ( <http://example.com/somedocument.html> <xhv:main> 
<http://example.com/somedocument.html#fragmentID> ).

However, we have no real way at this point to allow the addition of new 
attributes to our processing model.  There are no 'hooks' in the 
Sequence [1].  If there were, a specification like the Role Attribute 
could say 'When this attribute is used in an RDFa Host Language, its 
values are interpreted as predicates in processing step N.' or whatever.

So, that's the question.  Does it make sense to try to introduce this 
type of hook?  If we had one, would we also need a way of indicating 
(perhaps in a Host Language RDFa Profile document) what attributes 
hooked in where?  Sort of an 'instruction to the RDFa Processor'? 

Thoughts?


[1] 
http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/drafts/2010/ED-rdfa-core-20100401/#sequence

Received on Thursday, 1 April 2010 23:41:36 UTC