Re: customer feedback, please

Greetings to both the TF and the WG,


At Creative Commons, we need a solution for including RDF statements in
HTML chunks (XHTML 1.0/2.0, non-compliant HTML, etc...). The two
solutions presented have some attractive qualities, but they don't work
for CC yet.

For CC - and I believe for XHTML users in general - an RDF expression
solution should have the following properties:
	(1) a chunk of HTML, independent of the HEAD or BODY tags, can include
RDF statements.
	(2) whenever possible, RDF statements should be intimately tied to what
a user sees in the visible portions of the XHTML.

It seems that (1) is given to us by the XHTML/RDF proposal, and (2) by
the GRDDL proposal, but really we need both for this stuff to take off.

So, here's something that would work:

<!-- Begin Creative Commons License -->
This document is licensed under a
<a rel="http://web.resource.org/cc/rels/license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/">
Creative Commons License
</a>
<!-- End Creative Commons License -->

which would be translated to N3 notation as:

<> <http://web.resource.org/cc/rels/license>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/">

Using XHTML 2, one could wrap that in a SPAN with a CC namespace and
have a Qname REL attribute like cc:license. Dom mentioned that this is
not recommended by current standards, but I question why that is: isn't
the end goal of this whole effort to qualify links in the spirit of the
web and RDF?

The really interesting aspect of this approach is that the relationship
is tied to what the user can observe by clicking through on the link!
It's just a qualification of the link, which fits nicely into the RDF
paradigm.

The document at the rel type URI can include all sorts of additional
information in RDF format, including:
	- a link to an XSLT script that would yield RDF/XHTML (a-la GRDDL)
	- a human description of this type of link
	- links to any other tools that are relevant
	- etc...

Why can't we do this (or something similar)?

The GRDDL weakness is that it currently requires a HEAD profile, which
is bad because:
	- HTML chunks can't contain CC licenses
	- there's only one possible profile for the whole page

The XHTML/RDF weakness is that it doesn't tie the LINK to the actual
observable link that users click through, which leads to large headaches
in terms of XHTML maintenance over time (say you choose a new license...
are your metadata and user-observable HTML link still consistent?)

How can we get these to work together to yield the highly desirable
properties (1) and (2) from above? In other words, how can we augment
the current XHTML standards to enable current, "weak links" to become
RDF-strong links?

-Ben
ben@mit.edu / ben@creativecommons.org


On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 11:56, Dan Connolly wrote:
> I'd like to check in with anybody who feels like a customer,
> especially the intersection of this task force with the
> Semantic Web Best Practices WG.

Received on Friday, 19 March 2004 14:05:16 UTC