[whatwg] Ghosts from the past and the semantic Web

Kristof Zelechovski giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl
Thu Aug 28 11:59:26 PDT 2008


The copying and pasting is never transparent, there is always postprocessing
on the server side.  The server can transform RDFa input, clean it up and
put relevant information into the HEAD to make us both happy.  This is how
Wikipedia works; nobody protests that "<math>" is not in HTML because it
never makes it to the resulting page (although the fact that "<math >" is
not supported is confusing - this seems easy to fix).
I am not opposing local metadata; I have already explained you can use the
SCRIPT element for the purpose.  I only say that metadata should not be
inside content they describe in order to avoid circularity.  This is a
philosophical objection, not a technical one.
Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org
[mailto:whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of Ben Adida
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 8:45 PM
To: Kristof Zelechovski
Cc: whatwg at lists.whatwg.org; 'Eduard Pascual'; 'Shannon'
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Ghosts from the past and the semantic Web

Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
> If the blog site allows users to use a nonstandard license, it should
> support the metadata model you propose, i.e. it should provide a way to
> inject that information in the HEAD.  However, when I post to a public
> forum, I have to obey the forum's rules, which include subscribing to
their
> license in most cases.

Again, I would appreciate if you could allow Creative Commons to define
Creative Commons' needs, especially when it comes to changing the way
licenses are imposed on people. We've seen from our usage that the most
we can expect a user to do is to add *one* chunk of HTML to their site.
That's it. That chunk has to be both user-visible and machine-readable.

But even without CC, you're making a number of assumptions that are
fairly narrow, in order to fit your point that someone should not be
able to define any metadata for a chunk of HTML.

I think it's clear that the Ubiquity example shows how your assumption
is false. There is value in embedded metadata that is fully expressible
in a *chunk* of HTML that can be copied and pasted wherever you want.

-Ben




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