[whatwg] RDFa Features (was: RDFa Problem Statement)

[Kristof Zelechovski]

You cannot support both CURIEs and URLs.  What happens when someone declares
xmlns:http?

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org
[mailto:whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of Manu Sporny
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 4:50 AM
To: Ian Hickson
Cc: WHAT-WG; www-archive at w3.org
Subject: Re: [whatwg] RDFa Features (was: RDFa Problem Statement)

>> prefix short-hand via CURIEs
> 
> This is definitely not better.

I don't know where you're coming from since you haven't elaborated on
that statement nor given a link to a document explaining your thought
process. Since you haven't done so, all I can do is shoot in the dark as
to what your issue with CURIEs might be...

Let me first start with why we have this URL short-hand (aka: CURIEs) in
the first place. It is a feature that helps web authors and others that
are writing this stuff by hand to refer to long URLs in an easy way.
This means that the following:

<div about="#thunder" typeof="http://purl.org/media/video#Movie">
   <b property="http://purl.org/dc/terms/title">Tropic Thunder</b>
</div>

can be written like so, when using CURIEs:

<div about="#thunder" typeof="video:Movie">
   <b property="dcterms:title">Tropic Thunder</b>
</div>

all one must do to enable CURIEs, is to define the prefixes at any DOM
element that is higher in the tree, like so:

<div xmlns:video="http://purl.org/media/video#"
     xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
     ...

I can already hear the screams of protest on this list, as I understand
this to be the one of the most evil things that you can do in the WHATWG
group. :)

We have been discussing an alternate way of expressing prefixes, like so:

<div prefix="video=http://purl.org/media/video#"

The @prefix attribute above would take a space-separated list of
prefixes as CDATA, which could address one of the issues that the HTML5
community has with the CURIE proposal. However, I believe that we are
far from discussing this at the present time - the WHATWG would have to
acknowledge that web semantics is a problem they are interested in
addressing with HTML5.

Perhaps you could outline the reasons that the HTML5 community is so
allergic to the concept of URL-short-hand using prefix mapping in HTML
documents? I ask out of curiosity and because I have never heard the
whole story from the WHATWG's perspective.