RE: Microformats and URI based extensibility

My response is at
http://www.pacificspirit.com/blog/2007/09/28/microformats_and_uri_based_
extensibility

Roughly, I agree with your assessment of the lack of real world use of
@profile.

Cheers,
Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harry Halpin [mailto:hhalpin@ibiblio.org] 
> Sent: Friday, September 28, 2007 7:19 AM
> To: David Orchard
> Cc: www-tag
> Subject: Re: Microformats and URI based extensibility
> 
> David Orchard wrote:
> > Tantek has written a page on the microformats wiki where he 
> explains 
> > how microformats are a URI based form of extensibility and how the 
> > generic terms are scoped to within a root element.
> >  
> > It's at http://microformats.org/wiki/misconceptions
> 
> The grounding of microformats is of course of interest to 
> GRDDL, which crucially relies on profile URIs as defined by 
> XHTML 1, i.e. using a @profile attribute to discover a 
> profile that in turn has the transformation needed to extract 
> RDF from XHTML. This is a great use-case of 
> "follow-your-nose" in action, and it's even mentioned 
> explicitly by on the web-page about "misconceptions"[1].
> 
> However, besides hCard and XFN, almost no microformats *have* 
> profile URIs, and many tools don't use them. The reason is 
> two-fold. First, no-one has created profile URIs for other 
> microformats. However, it is possible if some one created a 
> series of profile URIs for microforamts, the microformat 
> community would accept them. Would the W3C be willing to host 
> such profile URIs?
> 
>  Another excuse is that using a @profile URI requires access 
> to the head element, which some tools  (like cutting and 
> pasting HTML code into HTML created by an automatic 
> microformat generator) cannot assume.
> 
> This situation is made worse by the fact that it appears that 
> the XHTML2 WG wishes to deprecate @profile URIs in the head, 
> and then move the profile to be under a "link" element. 
> Furthermore, there is movement within the HTML 5 WG to 
> deprecate any notion of @profile as well. Of course, the 
> GRDDL WG has sent e-mails to both WGs asking to maintain 
> @profile on WebArch principles, and perhaps some nudge from 
> the TAG might help our case if the TAG considers URI-based 
> extensibility to be important.
> 
> One possible "work-around" for profile URIs for microformats 
> would be to let the "profile URI" of microformats that do not 
> use a profile URI be the HTML namespace [2],and so ground 
> them in the HTML URI space itself.
> This is politically tricky since so many groups have their 
> fingers in that namespace and the process for altering it is 
> a bit unclear to me.
> For example, putting GRDDL transformations for microformts 
> like "rel-tag" in the HTML namespace would make them GRDDL-compatible.
> 
>           thanks,
>                 harry
> 
> 
> 
> [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/misconceptions
> In particular: "The XMDP spec 
> (http://gmpg.org/xmdp/description) and the GRDDL 
> (http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view) spec show how to make a 
> profile, and how generic data clients to follow, to either 
> ground the data into RDF, or use the data directly as 
> microformats with terms defined by their XMDP+ID URIs. This 
> will maximize re-use of the data, in combination wit other 
> data. There is a growing class of grddl-aware systems 
> (http://esw.w3.org/topic/GrddlImplementations) which will use 
> GRDDL-enabled microformat data without any alteration."
> 
> [2] http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/
> 
> >  
> > Cheers,
> > Dave
> 
> 
> -- 
> 		-harry
> 
> Harry Halpin,  University of Edinburgh
> http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin 6B522426
> 
>

Received on Monday, 1 October 2007 22:24:01 UTC