[whatwg] RDFa Features

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Ben Adida <ben at adida.net> wrote:

> Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> > Consider the question to be asked by me as well.  A host of a popular
> > format forgets to maintain its registration and gets squatted by a
> > malicious person. They pick up another url to host their schema on, but
> > legacy pages are still pointing to the old url and now may have poisoned
> > semantics.  Do we have a recourse?
>
> Well, for one, if you've got prefixes, you just need to change where
> your prefix points :) So that's kinda nice.


That's the issue.  We're talking *legacy* pages, which means that updates,
even fairly easy ones, probably aren't going to happen.


> But really, if an authority on some topic gets hacked, what is your
> recourse? What happens if Google forgets to renew their domain
> registration for one of their subsites (it happens to the best of us)?
> There are legal recourses that are beyond this discussion here.
>
> But really it comes down to: do you believe in the general sanity of the
> architecture of the Web? I do. It's worked pretty well so far.


Ah, but if Google *did* get squatted (and for whatever reason didn't get
their domain back), it wouldn't affect us humans.  Specifically, the
services that Google provides (search) wouldn't be permanently poisoned for
the average human, nor would it interfere with any other search engine.

However, a popular rdf schema being poisoned can easily have effects
blossoming out far beyond that site itself.  Anything which relies on that
schema is now assuming incorrect things and possibly impacting user
experience (why is it asking if I want to add this movie listing as a
Facebook friend?).  In the worst case, it may affect semantic search
engines.

That last point is a bit academic, as a search engine can just do a
'redirect' when it spiders sites that reference the poisoned schema, and
instead draw semantics from the known new location of the schema.  However,
this sort of issue may end up with canonical sites having to maintain
registries of moved schemas that automated tools can query against.

~TJ
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