Re: RDFa Core Review: Host Language conformance

On Wed, 5 Jan 2011 17:40:27 +0000
Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:

> Pulling together the statements that are scattered elsewhere in the
> spec, it appears that the Host Language specification can determine
> things that aren't expressible within an RDFa Profile.

Ultimately, as things are now, a host language can make whatever
changes it likes to RDFa Core processing. The examples you cite are
actually quite minor compared to how RDFa has been adopted in
OpenDocument.

Firstly, OpenDocument is zipped XML files. Secondly it has a
construction along these lines:

	<paragraph>
	  Foo bar <start property=":example" name="x"/>quux
	</paragraph>
	<paragraph>
	  xyzzy<end name="x"/> garb.
	</paragraph>

Which would produce (putting whitespace issues aside) this triple:

	<> :example "quux xyzzy" .

Ultimately I think market forces will keep host languages in check. If
you're producing an XML-based language for a fairly obscure use case,
and want to allow RDFa to be embedded in it, then you're going to want
to stick pretty closely to RDFa Core unless you want to spend your life
begging RDFa consumer implementers to add special cases for your markup
language. If you're revising an already popular XML format to include
RDFa, then implementers are more likely to be willing to meet you
half-way.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Wednesday, 5 January 2011 22:58:41 UTC