

REQUIREMENT: Ability to define objects that are resources, but not information resources

From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@x-port.net>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 19:33:53 +0100
Message-ID: <640dd5060705231133p3d37d89evd99d097f5d2174f9@mail.gmail.com>

Hello all,

[This is my attempt to more precisely define the '@href anywhere'
discussion, in a way that I think gets to the core of what it is that
we need.]

The requirement is the need for objects that are resources, but not
necessarily clickable links--i.e., not _information_ resources. In
other words, although we have the ability to create resources that are
at the same time clickable links (using <a>), I would argue that we
also need a way to specify objects that are resources, but might not
be clickable.

Feel free to disagree with this requirement on the grounds that it is
not useful--I'm sure no-one will hold back :) --but I would
respectfully suggest that disagreeing on the basis that 'using @href
everywhere is confusing' should be placed in the thread about how we
implement this, not this thread.

Anyway, enough on that...what exactly is the use-case? Well one
use-case that came up in discussions at XTech 2007 with the guys from
Joost about how they might use RDFa in some of their site's pages. One
thing that they do is give films a set of categories, such as genre or
country of origin. I don't recall the exact details, but this is the
sort of thing they wanted to do:

  <div about="http://joost.com/some-film">
    <div property="dc:title">A film</div>
    <div property="dc:description">
      Some notes on the film
    <span rel="dc:subject" href="http://film-vocab/horror">Category:

(I'm using the current syntax, but that is irrelevant here, since
we're discussing the requirement, and not the solution.)

Note that the URI for 'horror' is the category, and that the content
of the <span> is irrelevant from the RDF point of view. But note also
that the page authors don't want a clickable link for the genre, since
a user who follows the link would end up in the taxonomy! Anyway, if
Joost pages were to have a clickable link on the word 'horror', it
would be much more likely to do something like 'find all horror
films'--i.e., do something unrelated to RDF.

So, I would summarise this requirement as the need to be able to state
that some object is a resource, but that resource is not another HTML
document--i.e., it is not an information resource.



  Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer


  standards. innovation.
Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 18:34:09 GMT
