Re: Fwd: Review RDFa LC Primer & Lite documents

Thank you for doing reviews of the documents, Guus. This e-mail only
contains a response to your RDFa Lite 1.1 review.

On 01/18/2012 12:25 PM, Guus Schreiber wrote:
> =================================== RDFa Lite 1.1:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-rdfa-lite-20111208/
> ===================================
>
> Comments:
>
> 1. The abstract, the SOTD section and the Introduction state in
> total 4 slightly different purposes of the document. The statement in
> the abstract that "it does provide a good starting point" seems
> inappropriate, as advanced users may have good reasons to limit
> themselves to RDFa Lite. I suggest to state the purpose as the
> "minimal subset that works in most of the cases and can be
> understood in 15 min".

Changed to:

RDFa Lite is a minimal subset of RDFa consisting of a few attributes
that may be applied to most simple to moderate structured data markup
tasks. While it is not a complete solution for advanced markup tasks, it
does work for most day-to-day needs and can be grasped by most Web
authors with minimal effort.

I stayed away from stating a time limit (15 minutes) because it seemed
arbitrary... I don't think we should claim that it will only take X
minutes for someone to learn RDFa Lite... it all depends on how deep you
go down the rabbit hole. :)

> 2. If you want to encourage the practice of not creating blank nodes
> (as rightly stated in the Primer) I would include "about" in Sec. 2.1
> Now it looks optional/nice-to-have.

Unfortunately, schema.org encourages people to create blank nodes over
identifying the concepts in the page. The example shown is exactly how
schema.org is intended to be used. The other concern is perceived
complexity. The RDFa Lite document is meant to convey the idea that RDFa
can be very simple to use. We've been "fighting the RDF is complicated
and hard" argument for so long and in this case, we need to show how
simple it can be to express /a/ piece of data in RDFa... even though it
may not be the ideal way to express it.

In other words - by using @about for the simple examples, it is often
perceived that RDFa is more complicated than Microdata or Microformats,
which is not true... but the example is meant to fight that perception,
so introducing @about at that time would defeat one of the goals of the
example.

We do explain later on that you can identify things on the page with
@about... so, hopefully, the concept shouldn't be completely lost on the
reader. We also point people to look at the RDFa Primer, which uses
@about more readily than the examples in RDFa Lite.

> 3. I suggest to show the resulting triples, possibly in an appendix.

The choice to not show or talk about RDF or triples was a conscious one.
Talking about the data model was something that was left to the RDFa
Primer. There is now a sentence in the RDFa Lite spec that says this:

"""
If you would like to learn more about what is possible with RDFa Lite,
including an introduction to the data model, please read the section on
RDFa Lite in the RDFa Primer [RDFA-PRIMER].
"""

> 4. For properties pointing to a resource you only give an image
> example, with an "sec" attribute. Are you avoiding on purpose the
> use of "href"? I suggest "href" should be part of Lite.

No, not avoiding, just trying to be succinct. :) I added an @href
example to section 2.1.

> 5. The example in 3.1 contains none of the RDFa Lite constructs, so
> it not a good example (although conformant).

That section has been completely rewritten. Please let us know if the
new section is better.

Again, thank you very much for doing a review of the RDFa Lite document,
Guus. Please let us know if these changes have satisfied your concerns
by Wednesday, February 1st 2012 (the day before we decide to enter the
Last Call period).

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm vs. OpenTransact Shootout
http://manu.sporny.org/2011/web-payments-comparison/

Received on Saturday, 21 January 2012 21:41:10 UTC