Ian Davis
Fri, 16 Jun 2006 04:23:08 -0700
[removed cc to www-tag and newsml-2] On 15/06/2006 14:30, Ben Adida wrote: > Ian, I see on your blog that you said that using '.' and '-' were
arbitrary decisions. So, I'm wondering, since I now clearly understand how QNames are not supposed to apply to attribute *values*, why didn't you choose the ':' separator? There would be no overlap with QNames from a machine parser standpoint, since QNames don't apply to attribute values, but at least, from a "human parser" perspective, they would immediately ring a bell.
(Ben is referring to this post: http://iandavis.com/blog/2006/06/towards-copy-and-paste-erdf)
Using the ':' separator would have required CSS to be escaped which is pretty unnatural for any web author (I've never seen it done, even though it's possible). Even if that hadn't been the case I think I would have avoided the colon anyway. The colon carries with it a set of preconceptions about qnames etc. that I think is wise to avoid.
Also, I wanted to be mindful that I wasn't inserting URIs into class attributes but that I was mapping values from class attributes to URIs. Sort of a subtle point. The point is that I'm not trying to change or extend HTML, but add hints about how it can be interpreted as RDF. It's important that the HTML remains usable and idiomatic.
Ian -- http://purl.org/NET/iand Blogging at... http://iandavis.com/blog Working on... http://directory.talis.com/