Re: [RDFa] ISSUE-29: mime type of RDFa document

Hi Dan,

This is an interesting question. I don't think mime types were
supposed to be the disambiguater, though; I saw it more as a
combination of conventions.

Also, after working through this very issue last year I came to the
conclusion that whilst microformats ends up mixing resources and
information resources, RDFa's use of @about actually gets us out of
this bind. This is illustrated with some samples here:

  <http://www.formsplayer.com/node/271>

(It's just towards the end of a tutorial on RDFa.)

The whole thing is discussed more fully here:

  <http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/2006/05/information-resource-debate-and-rdfa.html>

where I work through my initial disagreement with the TAG approach to
resources and information resources...to discover that I was wrong to
disagree, and it's actually the only way you could approach the
question. ;)

Regards,

Mark

On 19/06/07, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
>
> Ben Adida wrote:
> >
> > Issue #29:
> > http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/29
> >
> > What should the MIME type of an RDFa document be? Proposal: whatever the
> > MIME type of the host document is. In the case of XHTML1.1+RDFa,
> > application/xhtml+xml. If/when RDFa becomes a valid extension for other
> > versions of HTML, then it will take on whatever MIME type they accept.
> >
> > Thoughts? Questions? Please answer, no matter what you think :)
>
> +cc TimBL and DanC here, picking up from an IRC discussion a few days
> ago. I was asking just this. Well actually I was asking about meaning of
> refs like http://example.com/danbri#me if /danbri is an RDFa HTML
> document. There is a tradition in the HTML world of #blah referencing a
> document section, and in the RDF world (with a lot of push from Tim) for
> #blah to be something that can name real-world (non-informational)
> resources. The general understanding is that mimetypes are the thing
> that establishes the interpretation of #. And so the answer to this
> question will shape whether people can address into the non-info world
> by pointing to #blahblah within an RDFa doc.
>
> For very concrete example, imagine this as RDFa in a <head> section:
>
>      <link rel="foaf:primaryTopic" href="#thething-itself" />
>
> And then later in the page contents:
>
>   <div about="#thething-itself">
>        <p property="xyz:abc">
>
> ...on the assumption that the xyz:abc property was supposed to be about
> the realworld main topic of the page (maybe a person, a movie, a museum
> artifact, etc).
>
> On my understanding there are some interactions between this style of
> RDFa and the existing conventions for text/html and
> application/xhtml+xml. Do we lose the RDF/XML idiom of using #blah to
> refer to the external world, then? Is this a big loss?
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>
>


-- 
  Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer

  mark.birbeck@x-port.net | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
  http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com

  standards. innovation.

Received on Tuesday, 19 June 2007 23:26:25 UTC