[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for

Peter Mika pmika at yahoo-inc.com
Tue May 12 10:27:20 PDT 2009


Just a quick comment on:

   it uses prefixes, which most authors simply do not understand, and
   which many implementors end up getting wrong (e.g. SearchMonkey
   hard-coded certain prefixes in its first implementation, Google's
   handling of RDF blocks for license declarations is all done with

Actually, the problem we see is not so much the prefixes themselves but 
rather the cumbersome way of specifying namespace prefix definitions 
using xmlns. So I think it would make sense to have some mechanism for 
referencing bundles of namespace prefixes ('profiles') or namespace 
registries, in order to easy authoring.

In terms of prefixes, I find that 'com.foaf-project.name' is a lot more 
difficult to write than 'foaf:name'. Reverse domain names are 
non-intuitive for non-programmer types (or non-Java programmers).

Cheers,
Peter



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