Re: RDF in XHTML

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


> Dan Brickley wrote:
> [...]
> > I've only just now realised that multiple profiles (a space
separated
> > list of their URI names) can be used in HTML simultaneously[1].

Note that HTML 4.01 (and hence XHTML 1/1.1/Basic/m12n) only consider
the first URI to be significant, whatever that means. There is also no
standard way for creating new metadata profiles, although I guess
using some type of RDF with XPath would make sense. e.g.:-

     [@rel='meta'] rdfs:comment "metadata relationship" .

Or whatever. Still, I realise that many people have used/are using
rel="meta" to point to content, even though it is non-standard, so
maybe if the W3C defined a simple profile that would be advantageous.
There were some comments posted to some WAI list about issuing an
errata for HTML 4.01 adding the "meta" link tpye, but as I pointed
out, if we're going to fix that, we might as well fix the other
"problems" with HTML, and we'd end up with XHTML 2.0 :-)

[Murray:]
> I'd likewise love to see DC content in XHTML, perhaps one
> of the first benefits of both DC and XHTML m12n to impact
> the greater web community.

Yes, I think so. Indexing is a very important part of information
management (perhaps the most important...), and XHTML has long since
lacked any form of rigid metadata system. Dublin Core has been going
for a long time, and is very popular today, so many people will be
familiar with it, and I'm sure it will be very easy to write tools
that can scrape the data out. Indeed, it should be possible to write
an XSLT script to scrape out this information, especially as the
content model will be well defined by the module.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Monday, 16 April 2001 15:52:13 UTC