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

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 12 May 2009, Peter Mika wrote:
>
> 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).

If we can come up with a way of using the string "foaf:name" without 
having to declare "foaf" in each document, I'm totally in agreement. I've 
considered maybe registering the "foaf" URL scheme, or using some other 
punctuation character and having people register prefixes, but I don't 
know what punctuation character to use (':' and '.' are both taken).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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