Comment on RDFa 1.1 Core: Empty elements should not create literals

Hello RDFa WG members,

This is a comment on Profiles in the latest RDFa WD [1]. The draft

    <div about="#person">
      <dt>Job title</dt>
      <dd class="job" property="jobtitle"></dd>
    </div>

After RDFa parsing, the following RDF triple is generated from this  
snippet (assuming a term mapping for jobtitle):

    <#person> ex:jobtitle "" .

I ask that the parsing algorithm be changed so that no triple is  
generated in the case where an element has a @property attribute, no  
@content attribute, and no text content.

The motivation for this change: Template-generated HTML often contains  
empty elements like in the example above. This happens when a field is  
not present in a given record. Generating an empty <td/> or <span/> is  
often less effort than suppressing the generation of the element  
altogether, so thats' what template authors often do. When a zero- 
length element carrying @property is encountered, then it's almost  
certain that the author's intention was *not* to generate a zero- 
length literal, so the parsing algorithm should reflect that.

Best,
Richard

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-rdfa-core-20100803/

Received on Thursday, 5 August 2010 10:54:15 UTC