PROPOSAL: Restrict @prefix declaration to the root element

This proposal was raised during the telecon last week[1]. Since document
authors can declare @prefix anywhere in the document, they could
introduce authoring mistakes due to copy-paste. That is, if they do not
pay attention to where the @prefix is declared, they may accidentally
attempt to express triples that do not have a CURIE prefix defined.

While a number of people in the group feel that copy-paste issues are
not really that prevalent, limiting the use of @prefix to just the root
element of the document may decrease the possibility of copy-paste
errors. That is, copying from one place to another place in the document
would not be affected by @prefix declaration.

The down-side to this is that all Web page authors do not have access to
the root element in a document, which is typically set by the content
management system. This would disallow people that know what they're
doing from expressing triples in their sub-sections of the document -
such as blog articles or comment posts.

PROPOSAL: Limit @prefix declaration to the root element in the document.

-- manu

[1]http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2011-07-14#ISSUE__2d_96__3a__Document_not_ready

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm Developer Tools and Demo Released
http://digitalbazaar.com/2011/05/05/payswarm-sandbox/

Received on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 02:54:40 UTC