- From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:05:52 +0100
- To: "Bijan Parsia" <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Cc: public-lod@w3.org, "SW-forum Web" <semantic-web@w3.org>
Hi Bijan, > One funny aspect of RDF/XML, as I understand the history, is that some of > the quirkier aspects of its design stemmed from the goal of being embedable > in HTML (hence all the alternative forms) in a legacy browser compatible > way. That's interesting, I'd not heard that. I did think though, that one of the things about the RDF/XML structure was an attempt to enable many XML layouts to be interpreted as RDF. But obviously that's enormously difficult. > In this sense, RDFa aims to fulfill one of the RDF/XML goals that helped > make it (somewhat) unsuitable to backend work (compare with NTriples). > > If at first you don't succeed, try again 10 years later ;) Work actually began on RDFa 5 years ago, so the wait wasn't quite so long before 'trying again'. :) But it's interesting that you say all of this, since my first attempt at putting metadata into HTML was to actually employ a subset of RDF/XML, applied to HTML documents. Part of the parsing rules for RDF/XML say that parsing can begin when an @rdf:about is discovered, so I tried things like this: <html> <head> ... </head> <body> <div rdf:about="blah"> ... </div> </body> </html> The elements prior to the @rdf:about are ignored in RDF/XML parsers, so it seemed that it might be possible to create XHTML+RDF/XML hybrids this way. But ultimately, getting predicates was way too awkward, and since the primary goal was to make it easy for people to publish metadata, this was a show-stopper. (Not to mention that having to use namespace prefixes on the attribute names would probably have killed the whole thing.) In the end it became easier to create a new set of HTML-specific attributes that played the same role as the RDF/XML ones, but over which we had complete control in terms of their meaning, position, etc. Regards, Mark -- Mark Birbeck, webBackplane mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number 05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4RR)
Received on Tuesday, 15 July 2008 12:20:46 UTC