Re: The IPTC's need for reification in XHTML 2 [was RE: DC in XHTML2]

At 3:34 PM +0100 6/10/05, Mark Birbeck wrote:
>Hi Al,
>
>I don't think you did the "if that's not the
>>  answer, what's the question?" step to back off to the real
>>  requirement.
>
>I see no need to be as rude as you were, but if you're unable to suppress
>it, why not at least make sure you are correct?

I agree that was a gratuitous slap; I apologize.  Thank you for
responding on the content where we really need what you have
to contribute.

>I have, however, some comments on the final part about @class, which I'll
>try to get down at some point, in a separate email.

Waiting for these with bated breath;  I wish we could get to
the bottom of this one.  The argument "@class is too tarnished
with habitual abuse" appears to me to be insufficient.

Where to have that conversation?  May I offer the wai-xtech list as a
follow-up to
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2005Apr/0012.html

... and if you can take the time after reading
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-wai-pf/2005AprJun/0191.html

... but you chose when you find the time and just let me know where it is.

>The reason that this can happen is that the IPTC have a requirement that a
>document should contain pretty much all of the metadata that it would need.

The "pretty much" here is key to what we feel we need for some forms
of service to people with disabilities, notably learning disabilities.

So far as I can tell, any vocabulary subject to quantitative pressures has to
be viewed as a middle level of abstraction; more is actually known than is
told, and what is told in the automation layer is probably further compressed
in the default use experience of interfaces to peoples filter rules etc.

Noah said it more succintly: partial understanding.

The point is that there is a cycle through push, pull and partial 
understanding.

Intelligent adaptation of the user experience may at times need to dig
back into the fine-grain definitions of the on-the-wire vocabulary.

For  accessibility, I would want to be pushing IPTC to stipulate that the push
vocabulary is in turn backed by pull-able meta^^N data where there are
minority users that would wish to expand on the knowledge in train of the
event-message (equals news story over the news-wire).

>I'll leave it there, since this may have frightened the life out of most
>people on the HTML list, and perhaps we can continue this thread over on the
>RDF lists.

Yes, I would like to stop cross-posting.  Send me off-list a suggestion
as to how I can monitor  progress on this stuff w/o papering the
Internet with cross-posts.

But "for HTML people" I do want to grumble about the following, that
I consider an over-step on your part (not rude, just inaccurate):

>(HTML people won't miss anything, since whether we add a
>sprinkling of reification or not has consequence for the RDF processing
>side, and not the mark-up.)

The idea that tokens live in the HTML in the context of the pull-able
further knowledge does matter to the designers of HTML. The
functional allocation between the fast (on the face of it) and the
slow-loop (in the context of the recovered metadata) processing
matters to the design of the format designed to meet all fast-loop
requirements and not break slow-loop functionality.

In other words, HTML people _will_ miss something if they don't
understand what reification does to possibly alter the answer of the
question: "who needs to go into RDF-processing mode to complete what
functions, and when?"

Thank you for your patience and perseverance in working on the expanded
metadata capabilities in XHTML 2.  For historical purposes, one can note
that the new LINK and META usages look a lot like what we asked for in
1997 [1].

Al

[1] find the text "LINK and META enhancements" in:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/report.html

Received on Friday, 10 June 2005 18:56:34 UTC