[whatwg] Link rot is not dangerous (was: Re: Annotating structured data that HTML has nosemanticsfor)

[Kristof Zelechovski]

I understand that there are ways to recover resources that disappear from
the Web; however, the postulated advantage of RDFa "you can go see what it
means" simply does not hold.  The recovery mechanism, Web search/cache,
would be as good for CURIE URL as for domain prefixes.  Creating a redirect
is not always possible and the built-in redirect dictionary (CURIE catalog?)
smells of a central repository.  This is no better than public entity
identifiers in XML.

Serving the vocabulary from the own domain is not always possible, e.g. in
case of reader-contributed content, and only guarantees that the vocabulary
will be alive while it is supported by the domain owner.  (WHATWG wants HTML
documents to be readable 1000 years from now.)  It is not always practical
either as it could confuse URL-based tools that do not retrieve the
resources referenced.

All this does not imply, of course, that RDFa is no good.  It is only
intended to demonstrate that the postulated advantage of the CURIE lookup is
wishful thinking.

Best regards,
Chris