Re: RDF in XHTML

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

> I'm talking with my manager about scraping up some time to
> devote to developing this idea into perhaps a W3C NOTE.

That's excellent news. We appreciate your time spent on this... I for
one believe it will be extremely worthwhile, and I'm sure that many
people agree with me. The synthesis of metadata with data content is
something that should never be overlooked, but for some reason it got
neglected for a long time... let's put it right.

> If you're willing to devote the lion's share of the prose content,

Yes, I am.

> I'll [hopefully] be able to provide the DTD.

Great. It'd be nice to hear at this point exactly what people would
like from this. For example, William Loughborough and I got UWIMP [1]
up and running a while ago which could already generate this sort of
data for inclusion into XHTML.

> I think along with such a NOTE we could advocate best practices
> for use of the DTD, as well as a standardized syntax for linking to
> external metadata,

s/could/should. We need to be very clear about the scope of what we
are producing, including all of the theoretical and practical aspects
of it. Recommendations, specifications, notes and so on are made for a
purpose, not just for something to read and debate over!

> The whole thing should only be a few pages in length (apart from
> the DTD).

Yes... Is there some list of best practises for commenting DTDs? I
note that the m12n DTDs are very heavily annotated, which is great,
but I'm not sure if that's a Murray-ism, an HTML WG-ism, or an XML DTD
community-ism :-)

> the external link idea (with perhaps some indication of what's
> at the other end of the link) might provide the necessary
> mechanism to satisfy the 80/20 point.

Yes, although more work is needed on the behalf of the RDF community
as well for identifying types of RDF, registering MIME types and so
on. Would anyone really be all that bothered if I used
application/rdf+xml for RDF now, even though unregistered?

Thanks for your time on this, it's appreciated,

[1] http://uwimp.com/

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

Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2001 17:56:39 UTC