[whatwg] Creative Commons Rights Expression Language

[Dan Brickley]

Bonner, Matt wrote:
>>> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Bonner, Matt wrote:
>>>
>>>     Hola,
>>>
>>>     I see that the Creative Commons has proposed additions to HTML
>>>     to support licenses (ccREL):
>>>     http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/SUBM-ccREL-20080501/
>>>  ...
> 
>>> Tab Atkins Jr. replied:
>>> The whole thing would be best expressed as a microformat, as the
>>> entire thing can be made just as machine- and human-readable without
>>> having to introduce an entire new addition to html.  I think someone
>>> is a little confused about the important of CC...
> 
> then Dan Brickley wrote:
>> I encourage you to (re)-read
>> http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/SUBM-ccREL-20080501/ ... the spec
>> explains that all of CC's concrete markup requirements are addressed
>> by the HTML additions in the RDFa spec. It does not propose *any* new
>> HTML markup to address CC's specific needs. 
> 
> (big snip)
> 
>> In other words, adding 'about', 'property', 'resource', 'datatype' and
>> 'typeof' and a namespace-URI association convention to HTML5 ...
> 
> Just so I understand you, are you saying that attributes aren't markup?
> Because first you say "no new markup", then you list 5 attributes to add.

Ah, sorry for the unclarity. Attributes are markup. The sentence comes 
as a whole: I meant that ccREL proposes no new *CC-specific* attributes 
or elements. They get their job done using general RDFa markup.

> Second, the Introduction cites RDFa, which footnote 4 describes as "an 
> emerging collection of attributes and processing rules for extending 
> XHTML to support RDF".  However, the Introduction text and example go
> on to talk about HTML.  Independent of any other discussions, I think it
> behooves the authors to clarify their intent. Is this for XHTML, HTML or 
> both?

Yes, this could be clearer. The group's general line (Ben feel free to 
correct me) is that this attribute-driven markup style is intended to be 
largely neutral of its 'carrier' format, but that RDFa-in-XHTML is the 
only version that is fully specified with implementor tests etc 
underway. For this markup to work in other XML languages would require 
some more work; for it to be deployed in non-XML HTML (HTML5 etc) 
requires even more. But the general notion is that these attributes 
could be deployed in SVG-based, HTML5/6-based etc. languages too, ie. 
that this isn't a project tightly bound to (some specific version of) 
XHTML. Of course in a non-XML context, some other mechanism is needed 
(eg. link rels) to associate abbreviations with URLs.

Also in http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/ (now in CR at W3C, 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-rdfa-syntax-20080620/)
[[
RDFa is a specification for attributes to be used with languages such as 
HTML and XHTML to express structured data. [...] This document only 
specifies the use of the RDFa attributes with XHTML.
]]

Does that help?

cheers

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/