Re: Draft agenda of meeting 8 April

Tim,

> At 09:53 AM 02/04/02 -0600, Garret Wilson wrote:
>>See the XPackage
>>example of RDDL information contained in the latest specification:
>>
>>http://www.xpackage.org/specification/
>
> There's something to learn from this all right but I don't think
> it's what we need for the namespace-doc application.  (1) It's
> waaaay too big.

I'm assuming you're referring to the XPackage specification itself, not the
documents that adhere to it, as the XPackage example referred to above
actually comprises *fewer* lines than the RDDL example from which it was
converted.

When discussing the size of the XPackage specification, keep in mind that
XPackage is really only:

1. An extension of RDF that restricts its syntax (making XPackage simpler
to process, with no knowledge of RDF required).
2. A set of RDF properties (analogous to the XLink arcroles used by RDDL)
that relate to packaging and XML resources.

XPackage defines a *lot* of properties, some that have nothing to do with
XML namespaces. It allows an unlimited number of new properties, just like
RDDL/XLink. RDDL is functionally a proper subset of XPackage, and if you
were to take away all XPackage properties that have nothing to do with XML
namespaces, the sizes of the XPackage and RDDL specifications would be
comparable.

I see it as a *benefit* that XPackage can be used for a wide range of
purposes to which RDDL could not be applied. (RDDL, using simple XLink
links, could not easily say that an XML document has a stylesheet and that
stylesheet's content type is "text/css", for example.) If that seems too
much for use with namespace documents, it would be a simple thing to
say, "for namespace documents, a processor only needs to understand the few
XPackage namespace-related properties" which, of course, correspond to RDDL
purposes.

> (2) I think for a namespace doc the top-level
> *really* needs to be XHTML so by default it's viewable in an
> ordinary browser without doing anything special.

That's another discussion altogether, but even if so, that doesn't preclude
placing an XPackage description instance (i.e. the particular XPackage RDF
ontology already created) in the HTML <head> or something similar, as
others have suggested.

> But xpackage looks to me like a good piece of work.

Thanks! I've been able to take some of the excellent work you've done on
the RDDL namespace description model and convert it from XLink into the (I
think) more robust and extensible RDF framework of XPackage.

Cheers,

Garret

Received on Tuesday, 2 April 2002 15:28:29 UTC