RE: HTML entry point for the RDF Namespace?

Please read and respond to Ivan Herman when necessary.
Hans

-----Original Message-----
From: Stian Soiland-Reyes <soiland-reyes@manchester.ac.uk> 
Sent: maandag 16 december 2019 17:06
To: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>
Cc: Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
Subject: Re: HTML entry point for the RDF Namespace?


On Mon, 16 Dec 2019 16:50:06 +0100, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
> I have just announced, in a separate mail[1] that some minor changes have been done on the RDF Core namespace[2]. While at it, I have looked at a discussion that occurred on the mailing list a while ago on whether there should be some human friendly version of the namespace document (duly served with content negotiations).
> 
> I have come up with a draft HTML file which is at a temporary URL for now:
> 
> https://www.w3.org/1999/02/rdf-syntax.html
> 
> the idea is that (simple) HTML file would be at https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns.html and, via conneg, would be served if the request requires HTML. However, by setting the right conneg priorities, [2] would continue returning Turtle.
> 
> The slight fear I have, and for which I would like to get some 
> feedback, is as follows. Imagine a buggy RDF implementation that uses 
> some very simple tools to fetch [2], and that tool would ask, via some 
> defaults, HTML. What will be returned is the no longer RDF but HTML, 
> meaning that this RDF environment would break. The question is: is 
> this a realistic worry, or am I too cautious? Ie, should we play very 
> defensive and NOT set up this human friendly version of the 
> vocabulary, or should we go ahead? Obviously, we are talking about 
> aesthetic here and not some functionally necessary feature, so we can 
> allow ourselves to be defensive…

You would know from web access logs if the namespace is being frequently access programmatically, which sounds a bit odd for this particular namespace. 


I think this would be a good idea. You can set it up so it is only served if "text/html" and/or application/xhtml+xml are explicitly listed in Accept - then it's pretty certainly a browser or crawler interested in human readable view.

Received on Monday, 16 December 2019 16:32:14 UTC