Re: "Resource" (RDF vocabulary definitions)

(This is being cross posted, is there a specific reason why?)

>>>Chris Catton said:
> Seth Russell wrote:
<snip/>
> > I think the party line here is that the mime type of the document gets
> > to define what the fragment means.  Since RDF is supposed to be served
> > with application/rdf+xml, then it can define the fragment differently
> > than text/html.

It is more than the party line; that is how Internet Media Types aka
MIME Types work.  And the registration document says how fragments
are used.

  application/rdf+xml Media Type Registration
  http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-swartz-rdfcore-rdfxml-mediatype-01

> Does this mean that if I represent a graph in rdf/xml inside an html
> document by putting some triples inside rdf tags it has a completely
> different meaning to a graph expressed in exactly the same way but served as
> an .rdf document?

That's a long sentence to reply to, but here goes.

An (X)HTML document is defined by the HTML specification and the
maintainers.  It has a media type (or several, another story) which
tells you that this is HTML, sometimes filename suffixes indicate
this on various systems.  So lets assume you have one of those.

If you then add some extra XML elements to that document, it is up to
that specification to tell you what they mean.  If it was your
intention for them to be a representation of an RDF graph, that isn't
something that the HTML specifications tell you, as far as I know.
It certainly isn't something the RDF specifications have any control over.

So there is no meaning for putting 'rdf tags' inside HTML to make an
RDF graph.  That probably just gives invalid (X)HTML.

Dave

Received on Monday, 25 November 2002 05:07:46 UTC