[whatwg] RDFa Features

Julian Reschke julian.reschke at gmx.de
Thu Aug 28 00:17:19 PDT 2008


(reposting a private email to the list...)
Manu Sporny wrote:
 > ...
 > The syntax document explains each bullet point more clearly in the
 > Introduction section[1].
 >
 > In other words,
 >
 > 1) CURIEs always map to a IRI.
 > 2) They don't have any constraints on the reference portion (the part
 >    after the colon).
 > 3) They can be used outside of XML languages.
 > 4) They were designed specifically for the purpose of compacting IRIs
 >    in attribute values.
 >
 > Does that answer your question, Julian?
 > ...

Not really. I get all of this.

What I don't get is why "QNames in content" are a problem, while "CURIEs 
in content" aren't.

The main problem with QNames in content is that they break when 
namespace mappings change. So first the W3C told people that the 
prefixes do not really matter, but then vocabularies were invented where 
they do matter.

CURIEs have exactly the same problem, no?

(I'm not saying it's a big problem; people have learned to deal with it, 
after all -- I just would like to understand how exactly CURIEs do not 
have this problem).

BR, Julian




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