Re: Comments on the current version of the RDFa Primer

Hey Ben,

On Apr 8, 2011, at 15:19 , Benjamin Adrian wrote:

> Hi Ben, Ivan and Mark
> 
> You did a great job when writing this Primer. I enjoyed reading it.

Thanks!

> Nevertheless, I found some confusing sentences and minor bugs.
> They are listed below from a) to i) :
> 

I have made the changed on the Overview-src.html file only. I have not yet regenerated the XHTML file, I will do that when we get to an equilibrium point...


> In general, I could not find any references to the RDFa API in this Primer. Is this intended? If you want I can create small code samples for the used examples on Monday (my wife celebrates her birthday this weekend :) ).
> 

Well, actually there was a reference in the 'some more examples section'. It only said that some of the examples there might require an API work, bot stops there. I am not sure that we want to go into an API primer here... But I took over your suggestion in textual references.


> My PhD supervisor always reminds me to refer to existing figures from text. I don't know if this should also be done here. But I think it won't cause much effort and in case of broken links to these images it would give readers a hint that something is missing.

Well, if you look at the text and the figures, the figures are always referred directly from the text. The placement of the figures is important here. So putting a reference may be a bit silly, because the text already says that...

> 
> a) In Section 2.2.2 about profiles you criticise the Google approach of inventing new vocabularies and mention the v:name and the foaf:name property. In my opinion this is a confusing motivation for profiles.
> I fear, ordinary RDFa authors won't get our point here. It also highlights the problem what Alice would do if she likes to use both foaf:name and v:name. I think we should focus on saying:
> 
> "2.2.2 Preparing vocabulary bundles, a.k.a. profiles
> RDFa 1.1 introduces the idea of bundling vocabularies into a single profile, making it particularly easy for HTML authors to combine the use of multiple vocabularies with markup as simple as the single-vocabulary use case."
> ...

Ok. I changed that paragraph but it required a little bit more than what you propose:-)

> 
> b) In Section 2.2.2.1 about Default profiles you state that:
> "Relying on default profiles is very convenient, but may also cause problems and affect the readability of the RDFa code"
> I don't think it is a good idea to implicitly deprecate the use of default profiles in the primer. Either we remove default profiles from the primer or I propose let us remove just this passage.

Agreed. I left (an extended version) of the last sentence, though, ie, that we do not rely on default profiles in our examples.

> 
> c) In Section 2.3.2 about the Social Network example you state that:
> "Alice is tired of repeatedly entering information about her friends in each new social networking sites. With RDFa, she can indicate her friendships on her own web page, and let social networking applications read it automatically."
> Well, indeed this is inspiring, and a great use case of RDFa and Linked Data. But what if someone else declares on his web site that Alice knows him.

That would be a very ugly thing. I will not put on my foaf page that you know me. I mean, I can of course do that on the RDF point of view, but that would be socially awkward.

> It would be awful if this gets into a social networking site like Facebook automatically. As this was my first thought after reading this paragraph, I fear we should better remove it until the Provenance WG generated a solution to this dilemma :) .

This is a problem already, and not and RDFa issue. Your mind is already set beyond RDFa, my friend, that is why you reacted this way...


> 
> d) Just before Section 2.4.1 Custom Vocabularies we mention:
> RDFa is a way to express RDF data within XHTML, ...
> This should be corrected to HTML.

Done

> 
> e) 2.5.1 Importing Data
> In the Primer we should refer to Javascript instead of ECMAScript.


Done

> 
> e1) I don't see any reason not to mention the RDFa API here.
> e.g., Amy also uses the RDFa API to automatically extract the event information from a page and some additional ECMAScript code that she found on the web to add an entry into a personal calendar.
> 

Added

> e2) Here is an encoding problem at: "Brian finds AmyÆs ... bandÆs page

Yep:-(

YOu were cheating. You said you had comment a)-i), but there were three here:-)

> 
> f) 2.5.2 Data-based Web Page Modification
> The text ends up to early here. We should add the sentence:
> "He writes a few lines of Javascript code by using the RDFa API to extract the URI of the applied license in order to look up a dictionary for the correct icon of this license."

Added

> 
> g) 2.5.3 about Automatic Summaries
> The example is buggy:
> change
> <span property="foaf:name" content="Bob">My<span> interests are:
> to
> <span property="foaf:name" content="Bob">My</span> interests are:
> 

Oops:-)

> g1) Please consider to add the sentence:
> "Finally Mary usses the RDFa API to extract this kind of information from the HTML source in order to populate the infoboxes."
> 
> h) 2.5.4. Data Visualization
> The sentence:
> "This enables him to build on top of the structured data in the page as well as letting visitors to the site use the same data to create innovative new applications based on the address information in the page."
> confused me, but unfortunately I am unable to propose a better solution.


I have simplifed and changed that.


> 
> i) Finally, the SVG graphics like very nice. But scrolling the document in Firefox 3.6 is horrible slow. Chrome is fast as usual. Maybe we should think of using PNG format instead.
> 

To my huge dismay I have had the same issue. And Firefox 4.0 is not much better.

Maybe what we should do is to use PNG and make all of them clickable to the SVG drawing...

Ivan


> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Benjamin
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> __________________________________________
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Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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