Re: RDDL Proposal from Tim Bray

Tim Bray wrote:
> I'm surprised at the lack of response to date.  The amount of 
> namespace-bearing XML in the world is increasing at a very high rate, and
> that rate will accelerate dramatically sometime next year with the release of
> MS Office 11.  I think it's important that we get some consensus as to what
> those namespace canusefully point at, to provide some interoperability in the
> marketplace.

I don't know about other non-participants, but the reason I didn't feel the need
to make a proposal was because having implemented and used it I've found it to
work well as it stands. This is not to say that it can't be cleaned up
(especially if it's to be "officialised" somehow), but I haven't personally felt
RDDL to have issues.

> I propose one new element <rddl:rr> for each related resource, embedded in
> XHTML as though it were in %Flow.mix, with attributes href, nature, purpose,
> title, id, and prose.

I generally like the syntax you show, with a few details:

  - "rr" isn't all that good a name imho. What's wrong with "resource"?
  - I would rather see that element be allowed to contain other elements. This 
allows one to directly relate some human-intended description with the enclosing 
RDDL pointer.
  - giving up on XLink is ok with me, but it does throw me off a little. I would 
tend to see "role" and "arcrole" as kludgy in XHTML too.

> Pro: easy for anyone to understand, parse, and generate.

That's true, I can see how I could convert existing documents and processors in 
an hour or two.

> Con: Isn't RDF, so not directly part of the Semantic Web (on the other hand,
> you could trivially generate any of the dozens of different RDDL/RDF
> proposals based on reading the above).

Well, I guess the RDDL for RDDL could contain the following:

<rddl:rr href="/rddl-2-rdf.xslt"
          title="RDDL to RDF stylesheet"
          nature="http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt"
          purpose="http://www.rddl.org/purposes#transform-to-semantic" />

Or something similar :) Nothing would keep agents from using that on RDDL, and 
of course from using that purpose for other vocabularies so that RDF would cease 
to be needed as an authoring format.

-- 
Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
Research Engineer, Expway
7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE  8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488

Received on Tuesday, 3 December 2002 05:48:35 UTC