Re: RDFa Primer ready for Working Group review

Hi Ben:

This is a (way late) review of the Apr 22 Editor's Draft of the RDFa Primer [1].

Hats off to you and the other editors--the new RDFa Primer reads
really well and covers the important parts of RDFa in an easily
digestible amount of text. I particularly like how you centered your
examples on the blog use case, and used it to explore the various
aspects of RDFa. Also, the diagram distinguishing what humans and
computers know about HTML documents on the web was a little bit of
genius imho.

Below are some specific comments:

- Section 1, paragraph 2

"When web data meant for humans is augmented with hints meant for computer
programs, computers become significantly more helpful, because they begin to
understand more of the data's meaning."

I had trouble parsing this sentence at first, and once I did I found myself
going down the rabbit hole wondering if computers really *understand*
anything? I'd recommend removing it.

- Section 1, paragraph 3

s/indications/indicators/

- Section 2.3, paragraph 1

s/Eve guest blogs, too/Eve guest blogs too/

- Section 3

"In addition to data about her blog entry, Alice wants to make her contact
information easier to read for programs that update her friends' address books"

->

"In addition, Alice wants to make information about herself (email address,
phone number, etc.) available to her friends contact management software."

- Section 3.2

The examples have an outer div with the following permutations:

  <div ...>
  <div ... xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
  <div class="social-network">
  <div class="social-network" about="#me" rel="foaf:knows">

I'd normalize them so that the first looks like:

  <div>

the second, third and fourth ones look like:

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

and the fifth looks like:

  <div xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" about="#me" rel="foaf:knows">

In general I'd remove the '...' from elements if possible.

- Section 4

"The point of RDF is to provide a universal language for expressing data"
->
"The point of RDF is to provide a universal language for expressing information
about resources in the World Wide Web".

"A unit of data can have any number of fields, and field names are URLs which
can be reused by any publisher, much like any web publisher can link to any
web page, even ones they did not create themselves."
->
"A resource can be described by anyone, much like any web publisher can link
to any web page, even ones they did not create themselves."

- Section 5

"RDFa examples are fleshed out over at the RDFa Wiki."
->
"More examples, links to tools, and information on how to get involved
can be found on the RDFa Wiki."

//Ed

PS. what did you use to create the graph illustrations? [2]

[1] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/primer/20080422/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/primer/20080422/diagrams/social-network.png

Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2008 14:19:04 UTC