Re: PHP Library EasyRdf to support RDFa in version 0.8.0

Hi Nicholas,

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Nicholas Humfrey <
Nicholas.Humfrey@bbc.co.uk> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> After many weeks of work I have just merged RDFa 1.1 support into the
> master
> branch of EasyRdf:
> http://github.com/njh/easyrdf/


Fantastic, this great news. I see you're using composer so that should ease
its adoption.


>
>
> There is still quite a bit more work to do until it is officially released
> but I am making the announcement now because I have gone over 90% test
> coverage for XHTML5+RDFa1.1 test suite.
>
> When I started writing the RDFa parser I was fairly shocked at how
> incredibly complex the set of rules are for writing a parser. The number of
> similar rules with subtle differences is very confusing. While there are
> only a limited number of people actually need to write their own RDFa
> parsers, I wouldn't underestimate how this complexity is limiting adoption
> of RDFa in general.
>
> Even after writing a parser, I don't think I could look at an RDFa document
> and know for sure what triples are that would be generated for the
> different
> permutations of attributes.
>

Part of this is the legacy that RDFa 1.1 is carrying due to backward
compatibility constraints. If we had to start over, there are some features
which we probably wouldn't want to include (e.g. the magic of some of the
attributes like about) and that would make the parser simpler.

Note that we encourage certain practices in order to make the authoring
experience easier, RDFa Lite is one example, also using @resource instead
of @about, using @property everywhere and avoid @rel. These are to make the
authoring easier, but of course as a parser implementer, you cannot take
these shortcuts and have to follow the processing steps carefully...

Steph.


>
> It would have been incredibly difficult to write a compliant parser without
> the test suite - so thank you very much for providing that!
>
>
> nick.
>
>
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-- 
Steph.