Re: Semantic markup of documents:

In my view, it is more of a problem to nail 
what meta information/relationships we want to describe 
rather than how.

I think that concerning navigation *within a page* 
sticking to structural markup and meaningful text, 
in particular link descriptions (anchors' content)
should do the job. 

If a page is so complicated that it needs meta 
information about the purpose of links, there is 
something fundamentally wrong with the page.

I think that the main usability problems are in navigating 
within a website, that is, between pages.

This may be addressed by using LINK elements
that describe relations between the source document 
and other documents. User agents may display/process them in 
some way. (I avoid the important question 
what are the relationships we want to 
describe, because I don't know the answer)

Using LINK is not in contradiction of using RDF.
They are complementing each other.
The RDF draft suggests to refer to an external RDF 
document using <LINK rel=meta>. 
Also the HTML4.0 spec suggests using the profile 
attribute of HEAD to refer to an (RDF?)  file that defines 
the meaning of the values of name in META 
(and rel/rev in LINK?). 

Nir Dagan                            
Assistant Professor of Economics      
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona (Spain)

email: dagan@upf.es
Website: http://www.econ.upf.es/%7Edagan/

Received on Thursday, 30 July 1998 13:45:50 UTC