[wbs] response to 'ISSUE-120: Use of prefixes is too complicated for a Web technology - Straw Poll for Objections'

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'ISSUE-120: Use
of prefixes is too complicated for a Web technology - Straw Poll for
Objections' (HTML Working Group) for Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu.



---------------------------------
Objections to the Change Proposal to simplify the RDFa-in-HTML
specification by removing features that are documented to be confusing to
users
----
We have a Change Proposal to simplify the RDFa-in-HTML specification by
removing features that are documented to be confusing to users. If you have
strong objections to adopting this Change Proposal, please state your
objections below.
Keep in mind, you must actually state an objection, not merely cite
someone else. If you feel that your objection has already been adequately
addressed by someone else, then it is not necessary to repeat it.
Objections: 
I have only a weak objection to a claim in the rationale but strong
objects to the "positive effects" section and the proposed change as it
is, since I find it hard to believe that doing the proposed change would
actually "let more people use it" as advised and making this change has
too many undesirable side effects.

I (weakly) object to the claim that arbitrary prefix mechanisms are
unnecessary.
Assuming there's consensus that adding machine-readable annotations/data
will make the Web better, the prefix mechanism is an important syntactic
sugar that will encourage authors to put more machine-readable
annotations/data on the Web. It also improves the readability of this
format. In fact, I would encourage the working group to come up with a
syntactic sugar for shortening property URL in Microdata.

I appreciate the effort to make the specification reflect implementation
reality. However, although Google's RDFa implementers chose to deviate
from standard, it's hard to believe that they would really like to see
the proposed change happen as then they will need to revise their
instruction pages (from <span property="v:region"> to <span
property="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#region"> and so on) and change
their implementation in an incompatible way. If advocates of this
proposal really want to remove xmlns="", prefix="" and etc., a mechanism
of unversioned/dynamic profile of prefix mapping seems better (and hence
the prefix is not rebindable) and should be proposed. It has to be
unversioned/dynamic as there are likely to be new vocabularies deployed
in the future. (Notice that a year ago there was no og:, and media: used
by Google's video search[1] is still not in the existing RDFa core
default profile[2]).

If the second bullet point in the details section is adopted, legacy
content
will be parsed into triples with predicate like "media:thumbnail"
as absolute URLs, and this is not acceptable.

I agree that prefix isn't easy, but I disagree with the claim[3] that
every feature in HTML5 is for "broad Web deployment". For example, you
need certain linguistic knowledge[4] to tell <em> and <strong> apart so
that you can use them as semantic tags. Perhaps the situation here is
similar.

[1] http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=162163
[2] http://www.w3.org/profile/rdfa-1.1
[3] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7670#c11
[4] http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/em.html





---------------------------------
Objections to the Change Proposal to clarify how prefixes work in RDFa,
and that they're an optional feature. 
----
We have a Change Proposal to clarify how prefixes work in RDFa, and that
they're an optional feature.  Keep in mind, you must actually state an
objection, not merely cite someone else. If you feel that your objection
has already been adequately addressed by someone else, then it is not
necessary to repeat it.
Objections: 
I have no objections to the proposed change.

But I object to using non-conforming content (such as og: content
without prefix declaration) or implementation in the rationale and I
would suggest the RDFa working group and/or the newly created RDF
working group do their best to correct misimplementations non-conforming
to the specifications. At least they should keep a list of conforming
and non-conforming agents as James Graham did. They should also do their
best to correct non-conforming documents if ever possible.



These answers were last modified on 18 March 2011 at 02:06:41 U.T.C.
by Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu

Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/issue-120-objection-poll/ until
2011-03-17.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer

Received on Friday, 18 March 2011 02:09:04 UTC