- From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 11:06:00 -0500
- To: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Cc: RDFa WG <public-rdfa-wg@w3.org>
Modularity
I feel that having a global namespace prefix map associated with a store is useful for
small applications, but bad for large ones.
Take for example an RDF system run by a browser,
in which everything which happens is stored, including the HTTP request/response
history, and information pulled from any pages the user loads.
This is used, ay, by many add-ons and plugs and applets which
the user may install to access the data.
The problem is, that while these apps must access the same store, they
cannot assume that they share ideas about prefixes.
This problem is exacerbated when apps use common libraries
which deal with certain types of data (say social data or statistical data).
Those common libraries must be able to be written using shorthand for
the namespaces they deal with -- but without danger of polluting
or conflicting with the namespaces in the
Javascript already has a dangerous global namespace which
developers of libraries have learned to almost completely avoid.
typically each library adds just one term to that global symbol space.
We already have similar problems with CSS classes in
javascript libraries -- there are dangers of clashes between classes
added by different libraries.
Ideally, any local names have javascript scope. This is why
foafname = foaf('name') is safe, and why
foadname = $rdf.resolve("foaf:name") is not.
Tim
Received on Tuesday, 4 January 2011 16:06:01 UTC