Re: RDF in XHTML [was: Re: Authors describing what their URIs mean]

From: "Murray Altheim" <altheim@eng.sun.com>

>RDF by its
> use of namespaces makes DTD validation very difficult, since it mixes
> markup and content and forces authors (not document type designers) to
> design markup.

I think if you look at RDF as markup, you miss the point of RDF.  When we
ask authors to describe a page and\or make assertions in RDF triples, we are
in no way asking them to design markup.  Anyway the hope is that tools
become available such that authors describe things in a user friendly manner
removed from the cybergibberish of  any kind of markup.   The most obvious
way to do that is for the authoring tools to pop up questionnaires when the
documents are saved.  Most authoring tools do this in some manner already
.... "all we need to do now" is to create the infrastructure such that the
questionnaires aren't fixed but can be chosen from a pallet according to the
context of the document.  Then we need a standard way for the tools to
associate those descriptions to documents.

> I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. You're missing nothing.
> There's nothing in the XHTML modularization scheme designed to allow
> well-formed [RDF] markup to coexist in a validation framework.

Ok, I see that now.

> > What am I missing?
>
> I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. You're missing nothing.
> There's nothing in the XHTML modularization scheme designed to allow
> well-formed markup to coexist in a validation framework. We could add
> a module that had content models of "ANY", but that still requires
> that the element types be declared, and this for RDF designed by
> authors isn't much of a help. I'd like to point you to XML Schemas as
> a solution, but the markup complexity that XML namespaces introduces
> is going to make validation of six or seven author-designed namespaces
> by *any* methodology extremely difficult. XHTML modularization doesn't
> try to tackle such a problem; only well-defined markup languages that
> each have their own DTD are mixed.

Well I was missing something.  I was laboring under the delusion that M&S
had specified a valid way to describe a page with embedded RDF.  Evidently
we cannot do it that way and keep the idea of validation ... or rather we
can with XHTML modularization, but it will become totally unwieldy .. so we
obviously won't.  So fine, but we are in fact left with the dilemma of how
to allow the author to describe their page such that automated agents will
know where to find those descriptions.

> You obviously don't work at a big company or a government agency. I guess
> we'll just have to disagree on this one. Describing the semantics of their
> web pages will likely be quite a bit more difficult if the markup isn't
> valid. In fact, a lot more difficult. I've got a small Java application
> based on xerces that won't work at all if the markup is not well-formed
> (given it uses an XML parser), and produces some very strange results on
> test documents that had validation errors. If you feel you can trust the
> operations of your business to such a situation, go right ahead. But I'll
> not follow. Not all markup is unimportant content-wise. What if 23 pages
> of an insurance policy were missing from a report because of a markup
> error (something I've seen in the QA dept. before).

Yep, I'm from the other culture ... i run a mom\pop business ... I just want
to be able some day to find a needle in a haystack.    Thing is that we need
to solve both of these problems ... validation *AND* user friendly  semantic
description.  We cannot accept a solution that sacrifices the one for the
other.

What is your solution?

language: Semenglish
Seth
    (wants you to buy something from) http:\\www.speaktomecatalog.com .

Received on Monday, 16 April 2001 14:20:22 UTC