Re: Scribed telecon discussion with Ben

On 3/22/10 5:11 PM, Manu Sporny wrote:
> Below is what I was able to scribe, it captures the gist of the
> conversation and Ben and I think that we now understand the crux of the
> disagreement.

Impressive that you were able to scribe this much while talking!

I would emphasize the following three segments:

> if you ask people
> that have been doing markup for years about the similatiries between
> "foo:bar" and "baz", specifically whether "foo" is in the same "bucket"
> as "baz", they'll say no. "foo" is a namespace with "bar" as the
> reference. "baz" is a reference -

I don't know if I meant to use the word "reference" or rather "suffix", 
so I'll rephrase this carefully:

If you see the following values:

alpha:beta
gamma

and you ask someone who's done any amount of markup, I suspect most will 
tell you that "gamma" is more like "beta", in other words, "gamma" is an 
unprefixed value, where "beta" is prefixed with "alpha." Very few people 
will tell you that "gamma" is like "alpha", only un-suffixed.

I know you *can* make the rules work the other way, but that goes 
against existing practices and even against the way we used to think 
about this ourselves, since we always talked about "unprefixed CURIEs" 
in RDFa 1.0.

In short: I think this will be very difficult to explain to people, and 
the value is not particularly high.

So regarding consistency:

> Ben: Worried that consistency that we're aiming for is consistency in a
> virgin world. Yes, it's consistent... but it's consistent in a way that
> nobody else has modeled this before... which will lead to confusion.

and the design principle here:

> Ben: You and Mark seem to be searching for the cleanest design.
>
> Ben: I look at it as what is the simplest incremental change? What is
> the most consistent story? How to have least possible impact on
> backwards compat issues? If this was RDFa 1.0, I would lean more in your
> direction... but we have implementations, markup and courses already out
> there and it's much easier to tack the @profile concept on as a slide at
> the beginning/end of a presentation than to rewrite the entire way we
> model and teach RDFa.

Hope this helps explain my point of view. I see little benefit to 
importing prefixes, and significant potential for confusion in exchange 
for that tiny benefit.

-Ben

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2010 17:05:47 UTC