[whatwg] Link rot is not dangerous

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 2:35 AM, Toby A Inkster <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
> On 20 May 2009, at 05:23, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>
>> Specifically, people can use a search engine to find information about
>> foaf.  I know that typing "foaf" into my browser's address bar and
>> clicking on the first likely link is *way* faster than digging into a
>> document with a foaf namespace declared, finding the url, and
>> copy/pasting that into the location bar.
>
>
> FOAF is a very famous vocabulary, so this happens to work quite well for
> FOAF.
>
> Consider Dublin Core though. Typing "dc" into Google brings up results for
> DC Comics, DC Shoes, Washington DC and a file sharing application called
> Direct Connect, all ahead of Dublin Core, which is the nineth result. Even
> if I spot that result, clicking through takes me to the Dublin Core Metadata
> Initiative's homepage, which is mostly full of conference and event
> information - not the definitions I'm looking for.
>
> On the other hand, typing <http://purl.org/dc/terms/issued> into my
> browser's address bar gives me an RDFS definition of the term immediately.

As Kristof said, while typing "dc" isn't very helpful, typing pretty
much any relevant property works great.  "dc:title", "dc:creator",
whatever.  It all brings up some decent results right at the top of a
Google search.

> Your suggestion also makes the assumption that there is a single correct
> answer that Google/Yahoo/whatever could give to such a query - that any
> given string used as a prefix will only ever be legitimately bound to one
> vocabulary. That is simply not the case: "dc" for example is most often used
> with Dublin Core Elements 1.1, but still occasionally seen as a prefix for
> the older 1.0 version, and increasingly being used with the new Dublin Core
> Terms collection. While Elements 1.0 and 1.1 are largely compatible (the
> latter introduces two extra terms IIRC), Dublin Core Terms has significant
> differences. "bio" is another string commonly bound to different
> vocabularies - both the biographical vocab often used in conjunction with
> FOAF, plus various life-science-related vocabularies.

And yet, given an example use of the vocabulary, I'm quite certain I
can easily find the page I want describing the vocab, even when there
are overlaps in prefixes such as with "bio".

FYN is nearly never necessary for humans.  We have the intelligence to
craft search queries and decide which returned result is correct.

~TJ