Re: ISSUE-1: Status of RDFa Profiles

Hi Ben,

> I don't think we'll be able to convince the average user that they are the
> same thing. I appreciate the elegance of Mark's proposal, but that elegance
> is at a level of abstraction that I think most HTML authors are not familiar
> with.

One piece of the jigsaw you are missing is that underlying all of the
proposals I've made, in these and related subjects, is a belief that
we should be moving away from prefixes, namespaces, @xmlns, and so on.

So whilst we might support the use of @xmlns inline, we'd encourage
@token/@vocab.

And whilst we might support 15 @xmlns declarations at the top of
Ivan's documents, we would encourage the use of profiles to capture a
bunch of these mappings in one easy to use package.

And whilst we'd support "foaf:name" we'd encourage profile designers
to define the token "name", and let authors import it.

This means that many of the 'confusions' you and Ivan are talking
about are not really going to happen, because the people who are aware
of 'tokens as prefixes' are the people who understand RDF and all
that, and will be comfortable using them.

But everyday authors won't even need to use prefixes, since they will
be using profiles.

In fact, I believe that we would have failed if we have not (a)
provided them with a way to write things simply, like @rel="knows",
and (b) ensured that they *never* need to use another prefix again
(unless they want to).

(Imagine a new version of the primer which doesn't mention prefixes
until right at the end in an advanced section. :))

So in short, we don't need to convince the average author that
prefixes and tokens are the same thing, because most authors won't
even come across them. And for the advanced author, it's no big deal
that they are the same thing.

Regards,

Mark

--
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street,
London, EC2A 4RR)

Received on Friday, 12 March 2010 10:47:07 UTC