Re: rdfa vs. links

On 10/24/10 2:27 PM, Lin Clark wrote:
>
>     With RDFa, when a user cuts and pastes visible HTML content, they also get the RDFa that is exactly associated with that
>     content.  There is a demo of a Javascript page that can receive the paste and display the RDFa nicely.
>
>
> I'm a proponent of RDFa, but I actually see this particular behavior as a bug, not a feature. Because the RDFa is hidden, you 
> can easily copy text from the Web and paste it somewhere where the hidden tags will make incorrect assertions.
>
> For instance, when I copy and paste a co-worker's name into a page on my Web site, it would copy the foaf:name property. The 
> foaf:name property worked well on my coworkers Web site, where the foaf:name took the URI defined in the parent element as 
> it's subject. However, when I place it in an arbitrary position on my page, it will then take another element for it's 
> subject... for instance, it might be pasted into a div about me, in which case it would assert that my coworker's name is also 
> my name.
>
> I'd be interested to hear what other's think about this.
>
> -Lin

With the data/metadata structure, shouldn't be a problem.  Additionally, there are things that both the browser could do on the 
copy or that the page could do via Javascript.  You may have noticed that a number of newsy websites now automatically insert a 
source / copyright / link before text that you've copied from a web page.  That could be used to pull the proper context into 
the copied data/metadata region.

I recently implemented an XML DOM parser with an embedded SAX engine.  Besides simplifying and fixing the DOM API, and 
optimizing it for Java, one feature that I needed was to be able to get the XML for any node at any time.  In addition to doing 
this efficiently, the library prepends an XML decl that defines all of the namespace prefixes used so that the fragment is fully 
parsable XML.

sdw