- From: Leonard R. Kasday <kasday@acm.org>
- Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 09:28:42 -0500
- To: w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org
- Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20001126091803.04ddca00@pop3.concentric.net>
We're talking about using RDF in a document to describe it's accessibility.
But there's something about RDF that bothers me. Even when metadata about
a document is in the document itself, the metadata has to include the
absolute address of the document. For example (this is taken from
http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ#How ,
quote
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.0/">
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://doc"
dc:creator="Joe Smith"
dc:title="My document"
dc:description="Joe's ramblings about his summer vacation."
dc:date="1999-09-10" />
</rdf:RDF>
end of quote
This is something in the <head> of a document. That rdf:about="http://doc"
is the address of the document itself. That raises philisophical and
practical problems.
Philisophically, it's redundant. It's also inconsistent with using
relative address for links, e.g. in <A href="../foo.html">. It also smacks
of GOTO statements.
From a practical point of view
- in many web shops, a web page starts as a local file, then gets moved
to a development machine, than copied to the productionm machine. Do we
have to change the rdf:about each time?
- if a page is mirrored, does each mirror have to have it's own rdf:about?
- if a directory is moved, do all the pages in that directory have to have
their rdf:about pages moved?
It would be a lot cleaner if rdf statements could have the concept of
"self" where the metadata refers to the document in which the rdf is
contained.
Is there any way to do this? Are the RDF people worried about this? Note
that we do not have this problem with <meta> tags.
Len
--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice) (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday mailto:kasday@acm.org
Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/
The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant:
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/
Received on Sunday, 26 November 2000 09:29:26 UTC