New RDF API and RDFa API Editor's Drafts

Hey folks,

As we had discussed last week[1], Nathan, Mark and I met over the
weekend and have been in steady contact throughout the week as we worked
through splitting the RDFa API specification into two separate
documents. We've probably put in close to 30 hours of work since Sunday
getting the two documents separated and figuring out most of the
difficult design decisions.

The first document is the RDF API specification, which is a set of
low-level interfaces for working with RDF data. The second is the RDFa
API specification, which is a high-level interface for working with RDFa
data in web pages in an easy-to-use, language-native format.

The two may work in concert, but we have carefully separated them such
that the RDFa API can stand on its own if needed. This means that both
specs are decoupled and can proceed to REC independently, which is a
good thing. Most of the really nasty design issues have been resolved,
but there are many more minor ones lurking throughout the specs.

All three of us are fairly happy with the direction and think that the
documents are in a state that the Working Group could use to evaluate
the current direction. Keep in mind that both documents are far from
perfect, very very pre-alpha - the prose is just plain wrong in most
places.

The interfaces are not as volatile as they have been over the past week
- so if you look at anything, look at the WebIDL.

The RDF API
http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/sources/rdf-api/

The RDFa API
http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/sources/rdfa-api/

We'll go through each document tomorrow.

-- manu

PS: Mark - the registerQueryFactory/registerParserFactory/etc. stuff is
not there. Nathan and I were able to come up with some very good reasons
we should think about avoiding that approach. However, that doesn't mean
that we may not put them back in the future. I think this may be the
biggest thing that the three of us may disagree on at the moment.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2010-12-02

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Linked Data in JSON
http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/10/30/json-ld/

Received on Thursday, 9 December 2010 05:59:32 UTC