Hi Misha!
If I understand you correctly, there is no *technical* need for what you
are proposing - it is in effect syntactic sugar. Am I right?
Isn't the problem more related to the display of the URIs rather than to
the actual encoding in XHTML? A smart application wouldn't display
http://example.org/subjects/Politics, but would shorthand this as
foo:Politics using some heuristics for determining "foo" (such as
looking at namespace declarations in the file), or better, use an
external RDF schema or SKOS declaration to find human-readable versions
of the URI. URIs aren't for human consumption anyway...
Thus, I'm not sure it is a problem of the format rather than of the
applications. Or is there any special reason that QNames are necessary?
Note that this is a very common "problem" in hand-crafted RDF as well,
where URIs used as values must also be given in full, which quickly
becomes tedious. One solution that I have used is to use XML entities,
as in this example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE rdf:RDF [
<!ENTITY rdf 'http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#'>
<!ENTITY dc 'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'>
<!ENTITY ur 'http://www.ur.se/mb/program/'>
<!ENTITY sli 'http://www.sli.se/rdf/subjects#'>
]>
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="&rdf;"
xmlns:dc="&dc;"
xmlns:ur="&ur;"
xmlns:sli="&sli;">
<rdf:Description rdf:about="&ur;6501117104">
<dc:subject rdf:resource="&sli;20200000"/>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>
I'm not 100% sure that this will work in XHTML2, but it's an idea
nonetheless.
/Mikael
Misha Wolf wrote:
> As some of you will know, the XHTML2 draft [1] introduces a
> very interesting syntax for RDF, which many would consider to
> be an improvement on the traditional RDF/XML syntax. No doubt,
> many content authors will be seeking to add DC metadata to
> their XHTML2 content using these new mechanisms.
>
> The News Architecture Working Party of the International Press
> Telecommunications Council (IPTC) is investigating the use of
> XHTML2 for expressing DC and other metadata. A major problem
> for us is the lack of support in the current XHTML2 draft (as
> in RDF/XML) for the use of QNames to express terms in
> controlled vocabularies (aka values of properties).
>
> At the moment, the XHTML2 @content attribute takes PCDATA and
> the @href attribute takes IRIs. There is no attribute
> available for QNames.
>
> We want to be able to use, eg, <dc:subject> with a QName as a
> value (ie the object of the RDF statement). The reasons include
> legibility and compactness. News items (and news headlines)
> often carry numerous subject codes, hence the need for
> compactness.
>
> Is anyone else in the DC community looking at the use of DC in
> XHTML2 and thinking along similar lines to us? We would be
> very happy to work with others on this issue.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2
>
> Misha Wolf
> Standards Manager, Reuters
> Chair, News Metadata Framework WG, IPTC
> Vice-Chair, News Architecture WP, IPTC
>
>
>
>
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--
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
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