Re: XSLT mapping rules and GRDDL profile for Facebook Open Graph Protocol

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:16 PM, Peter Mika <pmika@yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
> Hi Walter,
>
> I would not go as far as converting phone numbers to URIs. This would
> basically require a complete parser in XSLT to convert from all possible
> expressions of phone numbers to a normalized form. Such a parser is
> difficult to write even in code, and would certainly fail for a number of
> cases.
>
> Even email address can be tricky... if the email is only used for display,
> users are not required to enter a correct email address. At which point they
> will put in things like "pmika (at) yahoo-inc (dot) com", which is great for
> display, but parsing an email out of it is hard (in fact, it's meant to be
> hard...) Unfortunately, something that was designed to be a string, is best
> kept as a string.

I agree, particularly in the email case.  It's important that semwebby
people don't "look down" on these string-based forms of information.
The hunger for URIs and links and network effects etc can sometimes
lead us to forget that these other idioms are also valuable in their
own way... and that sometimes (eg.) it's more expressive to give users
a plain text "favourite movie info" field where they write a few
words, than to force them to give an ordered ranking of precisely
identified movies.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Monday, 3 May 2010 11:22:44 UTC