[whatwg] RDFa Features (was: RDFa Problem Statement)
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
Thu Aug 28 01:58:42 PDT 2008
On Aug 27, 2008, at 16:33, Smylers wrote:
> So that is one disadvantage of URIs: they are long. In fact they
> are so
> long that people have gone to the bother of inventing additional
> syntax
> to avoid having to write them out.
Moreover, having to look up the URIs is a major pain when writing
software that processes namespaced XML. I can remember "xhtml",
"xlink" or "svg", but I can't remember the namespace URIs. What random
year do they contain? Is there a slash in the end?
The RDF community has minted a lot of namespace URIs over the past 10
years. In addition to minting URIs, they have minted canonical
prefixes for each one. It would be interesting to analyze how often
those canonical prefixes actually collide and how often the local
property is within the namespace also collide when the prefix collides.
> That suggests that giving users the freedom to use either URIs or any
> other prefixes of their choice is superior to forcing them to use
> URIs,
> surely?
HTML5 isn't really giving language users the choice. It gives the
choice to designers of language extensions.
It seems to me that if the RDF community isn't going to stop using
URIs when they mint new property vocabularies, the only way to get a
bidirectional generic registryless open-ended mapping between syntax
going into text/html resources and RDF easy using URIs for identifying
properties.
So the cost of using URIs should be weighed against the benefit of
having such a generic bidirectional mapping that is open-ended in the
sense that the mapping algorithm doesn't need new out-of-band input
from a registry (other than the URI scheme and domain name registries
apparently...) when someone mints a new vocabulary.
. . .
If we didn't want the mapping to be bidirectional and only wanted it
to be unidirectional from HTML identifiers onto URIs, we could specify
that you can make a URI from any identifier you find in HTML by
concatenating it to a common URI prefix. It doesn't really matter much
if we call the prefix http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#, http://n.whatwg.org/rdf-compat#
or something else. (To avoid collisions between e.g. rel and class,
you could put the attribute name in the URI: http://n.whatwg.org/rdf-compat/rel#keyword
http://n.whatwg.org/rdf-compat/class#class-name.)
. . .
But with a scheme that maps HTML syntax to *some* URIs, can the Power
of RDF solve the rest? After all, the Power of RDF already assumes
that clients have hard-coded knowledge of URI schemes (at least http)
and can consult DNS dynamically. Moreover, the Power of RDF already
assumes a dynamically consulted mapping registry (like http://creativecommons.org/ns#)
per each vocabulary. We could just say that HTML5 is one big
vocabulary, so it can have one mapping registry.
The HTML5 draft already specifies a registry for rel values:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/RelExtensions
What if this registry where extended to contain machine-readable
equivalence statements between rel values and RDF properties and the
registry was then served at http://n.whatwg.org/rdf-compat/rel with
n.whatwg.org served by a CDN? An RDF-in-HTML5 client seeing
rel=license could dereference the URI http://n.whatwg.org/rdf-compat/
rel and find that #license is same as http://creativecommons.org/ns#license
.
When going from RDF to HTML5, the converter would consult the registry
to find equivalences in the other direction.
Now, one might argue that this introduces a single point of failure
when n.whatwg.org goes down. However, if you are traversing a graph
with more than one namespace you'd get distributed failure combined
with AND. Usually, when you distribute something you want the failure
to be combined with OR. Suppose that the servers serving namespace
documents have a 1% probability of being down at a given moment. If
your graph only depends on one such server your probability of success
is 99%. However, if traversing your graph requires dereferencing
namespace URI is from 10 servers, the probability of success is only
90% (.99^10).
--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
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