Hi,
Am 30.07.2007 um 17:15 schrieb Manu Sporny:
Mark Birbeck wrote:
I haven't had a chance to re-read this thread, so I'm not going to
say
anything on the substance. But if you don't mind, I'd like to comment
on a recurring theme, which seems exemplified by the following:
I have a visceral problem with about="_:", and that is that it makes
bnodes explicit, which I really don't want to do to HTML authors.
That's
just too much RDF.
I don't see the need to 'protect' authors who are not familiar with
RDF from RDF constructs that they will never use. If someone from the
RDF community thinks this is useful, and _if_ we can support it
without it getting in the way, then why not?
Constructs such as "_:" are scary to non-RDF folks. :) From a
historically RDF-unaware perspective (mine), I stared at the "_:"
construct and had no idea what it does. It is not very intuitive.
Even having seen it, I haven't taken the time to look up what it
means.
It will probably make sense when I do, but to somebody that is not
trained in CS/EE/ECE/etc., this is a scary construct. To the lay web
page author, it is syntactic gibberish.
There is already a very strong feeling in the Microformats community
that RDFa is far too complicated for most web page authors. The last
thing most of them want to learn is yet another language syntax for
describing what they see as "corner-cases of the language".
I see your argument: If they aren't going to use it, and if it doesn't
cause any harm, then why not put it in there?
I would argue that you shouldn't put things in there that aren't
absolutely necessary. It complicates the RDFa specification. If
there is
a need in the future, you can always add it in a later revision.
I would really argue to have bnodes in RDFa: I know they are very
unpopular, and vocabularies like FOAF now recommend against using
them. However, I hope that RDFa will, once it's finished, be a syntax
for RDF that covers the whole specification. In fact, when I first
heard about RDFa, I was put off, because I somehow thought it didn't
allow you to express everything you can model in RDF.
In my particular use case (generating RDFa from desktop objects like
address book or calendar entries) I often don't have a useful URI for
the things I want to publish in RDFa: what is the URI of a person in
my address book? What is the URI of an event in my calendar? I have
the choice tof making up a bogus URI (that's bad, because it can't be
resolved) or using a blank node. I find the latter option much more
elegant.
I think that, once the RDFa specification is done, problems like
scaring people off with concepts like bnodes can be handled on the
documentation level. I mean, think of all the weird stuff you can do
with Java (or any programming language). This hasn't stopped it from
becoming very popular indeed. As long as you give people some good
"Hello World" examples, and convince them that your technology is
actually useful, they will still use it, despite its complexity.
Cheers,
Knud
-------------------------------------------------
Knud Möller, MA
+353 - 91 - 495086
Smile Group: http://smile.deri.ie
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Galway
Institiúid Taighde na Fiontraíochta Digití
Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh
