a 'loose' vocab proposal

Hello all,


This is a lose in a nutshell proposal for the RDFa attribute "vocab", 
Its based on discussions that many of us have had on this list over the 
last week or two.


This method was  most recently brought up by Toby with his proposals on 
setting a default CURIE prefix, and re-raised later by myself in various 
guises and forms ;)


1, Set the "default prefix" by using the attribute "vocab"

<div vocab="http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#">

     <div about="#fred" typeof="VCard">

         <div property="fn">Fred</div>

         <a rel="url" href="http://example.com/">  Home</a>

     </div>

</div>

The vocab attribute may be used one or more times.

If a Parser encounters nested vocab's treat the first ( parent ) vocab 
as the "default prefix" . For all child vocab's generate a pseudo 
prefix, example: ns1, ns2, ns3 ... etc , this will help avoid generating 
"invalid" RDF/XML by switching the default namespace mid parse. ( Ivans 
and my concern )

2, Extending vocabulary terms using "vocab:"

Is mostly as Mark Birbeck's suggestions in his article "tokenising the 
semantic web" and a recent email to the list that his proposals were 
"completely independent of how tokens are declared", it could use xmlns, 
vocab or anything else.

Shane McCarron also mentioned in a message to the list that the vocab 
attribute should be scoped just like xmlns (I hope I understood that 
correctly),

<div vocab="http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#">

     <div about="#fred"   typeof="VCard"

  vocab:me="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11#me">

         <div property="fn">Fred</div>

         <a rel="url me" href="http://example.com/">  Home</a>

     </div>

</div>

vocab:me defines a new vocabulary term and url for the token  "me".


Best wishes.

-- 
Martin McEvoy