Re: RDFa is in PR!

On Sun, 13 May 2012 16:58:25 +0200
Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org> wrote:

>    <div vocab="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" subjecttype="Person">

The @typeof attribute was used in RDFa 1.0 four years ago, and there's
pretty much zero-chance of it getting changed now. It's an incredibly
badly named attribute.

 - Toby Inkster is an *instance of* foaf:Person.
 - Toby Inkster is *of type* foaf:Person.
 - But Toby Inkster is NOT a *type of* Person.

Nevertheless, that ship has sailed. (For what it's worth, early drafts
of RDFa 1.0 used @instanceof, and my RDFa parser still supports this,
albeit while emitting a warning.)

> the div is not a person. its subject (topic) is.

Would you apply the same logic to...

 <rdf:Description rdf:type="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person" />

The XML element is (after all) not a person.

I think you're not seeing the distinction between the map and the
territory [1], or perhaps you don't understand in what way RDFa
distinguishes between them.

In asserting <div typeof="Person">, you're asserting that the <div>
describes a person, not that the <div> actually is a person. That's
simply how @typeof works - it means "this element describes a", not
"this element is a".

If you actually want to assert something about an HTML element, then it
requires more roundabout markup:

 <p about="#foo"
    typeof="http://example.com/ImportantThing">
   The following paragraph is very important!
 </p>
 <p id="foo">Hello World</p>

Or even:

 <p about="#foo" id="foo"
    typeof="http://example.com/ImportantThing">
   This paragraph is very important!
 </p>

____
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation

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

Received on Tuesday, 22 May 2012 12:31:41 UTC