Re: semantics vs. document markup

The answer is simple: the appeal of DocBook and other popular XML 
schemas and DTDs is that there is open source and commercial software 
out there that understands them. Once you create a conforming DocBook 
document, you can convert it to HTML, PDF, and other formats without 
having to code the processing of your document because others have done 
it. <application>Foo</application> in a DocBook document is something 
that they'll understand. (I don't think they'll understand 
<docbook:application>Foo</docbook:application>, because the last I 
checked there was no namespace declared for DocBook. I saw that you 
didn't include a declaration for the DocBook: prefix in your example.) 
So, doing it the DocBook way lets you take advantage of DocBook software 
with a minimum of effort.

RDFa can still contribute a lot. The DocBook schema is very extensible, 
but once you extend it to accommodate RDFa you can add any new 
properties you want without having to revise the schema. There's not 
much point in using RDFa to identify properties that are already part of 
the DocBook schema, but RDFa is great for adding things that aren't 
already there. I wrote more about this at 
http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/42543/1954 .

Bob DuCharme
@bobdc, @learningsparql
www.learningsparq.com


On 12/30/2011 10:30 PM, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>>>>>> Ivan Shmakov<oneingray@gmail.com>  writes:
>      Looks like that the first paragraph of the message I've sent has got
>      mangled away.  (I vaguely recall that the inn-workers@ mailing list
>      had a similar or the same problem with the message bodies starting
>      with whitespace.  IIRC, one of the folks there attributed to
>      Ecartis, and ISTR that it has disappeared after they've switched to
>      Mailman.)
>
>      The paragraph was:
>
>  I'm curious, given that with RDFa and the like I can easily
>  introduce a “resource”, described within the RDF framework and
>  using the vocabularies of my choice, why would I prefer, e. g.,
>  <docbook:application>Foo</docbook:application>  in my DocBook XML
>  document over something along the lines of the following?
>
>   >  <docbook:phrase
>   >    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
>   >    xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
>   >    xmlns:foo="http://example.org/classes/"
>   >    about="http://gnuplot.info/"
>   >    property="dc:title"
>   >    ><docbook:phrase
>   >       property="rdf:type"
>   >       resource="foo:SoftwareApplication"
>   >       />Gnuplot</docbook:phrase>
>
>   >  (Sans that it's more verbose, and that DocBook's ‘phrase’
>   >  doesn't allow for ‘about’, etc.)
>
>   >  TIA.  And HNY.
>

Received on Monday, 2 January 2012 19:00:07 UTC