RE: Human Friendly Trix

> Danny Ayers writes:
>  >
>  > > http://www.phildawes.net/2004/01/trix
>  >
>  > ..forgive me for being blunt, but the human-friendly TriX
> document looks
>  > remarkably like striped RDF/XML. That is with the exception of
> qnames in
>  > attributes, syntax which tends to make the xml-dev folks
> become blessed with
>  > kittens and the good gentlemen of TAG remember they had dinner
> appointments.
>  >
>
> In my defense I ought to point out that I wasn't trying to design the
> perfect RDF/XML syntax - really I was just experimenting with how easy
> it would be to map an rdf/xml-like syntax into trix using xslt.

I must apologise for my kneejerk reaction - if the syntax is XSLT'able then
it's a significant step forward.

> I don't think it's possible to come up with one RDF/XML syntax that
> will please both XML people and RDF people (see RSS!). That's why I
> think trix's xsl extension mechanism is so important - lots of XML
> syntaxes can exist without harming interoperability between SW agents.

Yep.

> Having thought about it, one downside to using the xml-stylesheet tag
> to identify the to-trix stylesheet is that it doesn't (AFAICS) let the
> client know that the stylesheet will output trix. This means that the
> XML file must be targetted specifically at being read by a TriX
> parser, since any other agent applying the stylesheet automatically
> (e.g. a web browser) won't understand the trix output.

Just a thought - a CSS stylesheet could also be attached for pretty-printing
in browsers.

> It would be nice to be able to have multiple XSLT stylesheet
> references, allowing the agent to choose which stylesheet to apply
> depending on the output mimetype it wants. Is this possible with the
> current set of XML standards?

Hmm, not 100% sure, but I believe the mime type in the xml-stylesheet refers
to the stylesheet itself rather than the result of transformation, so it
probably isn't possible directly that way (it should be
"application/xslt+xml" but I think browsers only understand "text/xsl"). I
presume it should be possible to define a new PI for the purpose, e.g.

<?trix-processor type="whatever"
href="http://www.phildawes.net/2004/01/trix/humanreadable-trix.xsl" ?>

It could be confusing though. Perhaps a better approach might be to somehow
lever the GRDDL work [1], which offers some alternatives for saying "style
this", like <link rel="style.xsl"> (for XHTML) and
data-view:interpreter="style.xsl" (other XML). I assume the result for GRDDL
will always be RDF/XML.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh

Received on Friday, 20 February 2004 07:02:20 UTC