RE: XHTML and RDF

Hi Ian,

Very useful comments - thanks.

Some of them I will have to think about further, but if I may address
one now:

> I think it [MB - the reference to another part of the document] would
be much
> more usable from an authoring perspective, however, as something like
(conceptual
> example only):
>
>  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2003/xhtml">
>     <head>
>       <title>Some quotes</title>
>     </head>
>     <body>
>       <blockquote>
>         <link
rel="source">http://example.com/tolkien/twotowers.html</link>
>         <p>They went in single file ... </p>
>       </blockquote>
>     </body>
>   </html>

I agree with you that is also a useful syntax, but I have been trying to
find a way of supporting both constructs - the indirection one and this
one. The problem is that if you make <link> and <meta> refer to their
parent element (which is also nice from an RDF viewpoint), then you have
to come up with a way of indicating that the statements inside <head>
refer to the document. I had some ideas on that, but decided to leave
them for later - however, hopefully if the general view is that the
proposal is going in the right direction then we can try to tackle the
subtleties.

> The common point here is removing indirection. Namespaces, IDREFs, and
RDF
> assertions about remote resources (even "remote" as in "lower down in
this
> document") are all examples of indirection. Authors hate indirection.

Mmm ... and some authors love it! My main goal was to try and provide a
number of ways of expressing information, such that the author could
choose whatever level they felt comfortable with - but with the ultimate
goal that the many systems we have for dealing with metadata could take
advantage of the wealth of information contained in documents.

Thanks for the extremely useful input.

Regards,

Mark


Mark Birbeck
CEO and CTO
x-port.net Ltd.

http://www.formsPlayer.com/

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 12:58:07 UTC