Re: rdfa vs. links

On 10/25/10 3:36 AM, Lin Clark wrote:
>
>     With the data/metadata structure, shouldn't be a problem.
>
> I'm unclear on what you mean here.

I meant to say "With the right data/metadata structure".  What I was thinking of was that you could annotate a page at the high 
level, then have per-item metadata that relied on that page-level metadata, or you could make the metadata for each item more 
independent.  In the latter case, finer grained copy/paste could still make sense where in the former case, only by getting the 
whole page would the metadata be coherent.
>
>     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.
>
>
> While browsers could do something, it seems unlikely that this will happen in the near term. Having the page do it via Javascript 
> would be a solution, but it adds one more thing (and an undocumented thing at that) that users have to remember to add when they 
> add RDFa to a page.

If fixed via Javascript, it would probably be via a library that everyone would start using.

sdw

>
> I see the underlying concern here not as to whether a technically saavy person can make it work, but whether the common user 
> copying and pasting text on the Web can make it work (or at least not screw things up). And right now, that is definitely not the 
> case.
>
> -Lin
>
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 4:19 AM, Stephen Williams <sdw@lig.net <mailto:sdw@lig.net>> wrote:
>
>     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
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Lin Clark
> DERI, NUI Galway <http://www.deri.ie/>
>
> lin-clark.com <http://lin-clark.com>
> twitter.com/linclark <http://twitter.com/linclark>
>


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Received on Monday, 25 October 2010 21:24:48 UTC