Last Call Comment: Support Token-like behavior in @prefix

I just noticed that an issue concerning CURIEs hadn't been raised and I
think that Mark meant to do so before the LC period ended for RDFa Core.
We had a brief discussion about why one couldn't do this:

<div xmlns:Person="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person"
     xmlns:name="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name"
     about="#me" typeof="Person" property="name">Frank</div>

I was convinced that this was not allowed in RDFa 1.0, but
lo-and-behold, take the text above and plug it into Live Loop:

http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/live-loop/

and out come these triples:

<http://example.com/sample.html#me>
   <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type>
      <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person> .
<http://example.com/sample.html#me>
   <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name>
      "Frank" .

Now, clearly my parser is wrong because it violates the production rules
for a CURIE, but we don't have a test in the test suite that checks this
and it has gone all of this time without being detected.

This raises the question - if a fully conforming RDFa 1.0 processor can
pass the test suite /and/ support the mechanism above, why don't we just
relax the CURIE rules to allow reference-less CURIEs?

If we do that, why not allow something like this in RDFa 1.1:

prefix="Person: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person
        name: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name"

I don't believe we create any backwards incompatibilities, and this way,
people that are concerned about not being able to specify RDFa Profile
Terms without using an external document could use this method instead.

So, the LC request is to relax the rules for CURIE production to allow
the mechanism described above.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Linked Data in JSON
http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/10/30/json-ld/

Received on Wednesday, 5 January 2011 04:02:47 UTC