[whatwg] Absent rev?

[Dan Brickley]

Smylers wrote:
> Dan Brickley writes:
> 
>> Smylers wrote:
>>
>>> Martin McEvoy writes:
>>>
>>>> !! rel-author doesn't mean the same as rev-made eg:
>>> In which cases doesn't it?  If A is the author of B then B was made by
>>> A, surely?
>> Then B contributed to the creation of A, yes. Perhaps not on their own.
>>
>> But we need it in the other direction too: can we conclude from { A made  
>> B } that { B author A } ?
>>
>> Not if B isn't textual. Authorship is about writing, but there are
>> many other avenues for human creativity (some of which result in
>> things with URLs, eg. software, images, sounds).
> 
> Firstly, the term author can be used for at least some of those things;
> definitely software.

Yes, 'software' was a bad example. But Dublin Core certainly did abandon 
the early term 'author' in favour of 'creator' after a workshop looking 
at requirements around images, museum artifacts and so on.

> Secondly, if you think made is more generic than author, then surely
> linking to such URLs with rel=made is an improvement on using
> rev=author?

I don't associate 'being more generic' as a positive or a negative 
thing. Sometimes we want specificity, sometimes not. There is value in a 
'see also' relationship type; there is value in a 'schoolHomepage' 
relationship type too. Neither need be better.

If I wanted to find written works, then 'author' is a more relevant 
property than 'made'. If my concern is to find all the things created by 
some party, then 'made' may be more useful. My point was just that they 
have a different meaning (although much overlap).

>> First is "a" versus "the". Nothing warrants reading "the" into
>> rel=author.
> 
> So presumably also nothing warrants reading "the" into rel=made?

Yup. If syntactic context (eg. via RDFa) associated the string 'made' 
with a specific definition rather than just the English word, then of 
course that definition could say anything it wanted - such as 'sole 
maker of ...' , 'primary maker of', etc.

>> The early Dublin Core specs had a "dc:author" property. This was
>> changed back in 1996 or so to be dc:creator,
> 
> I agree that creator would be a better term than author.  But I think
> that's irrelevant to needing rev.

Without rev, content creators (in every language) will need to go 
through this dance, hunting through dictionaries and debating 
subtleties, to make sure that they've identified a suitable pair of 
words such that { X word1 Y } is true if and only if { Y word1 X }. 
Which is why I see this in terms of division of labour. Cleaning it out 
of HTML5 makes work elsewhere...

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/

> 
> Smylers
> 
>