On Thu, 17 Apr 1997, Thomas Krichel wrote:
> This is the point that is holding me back. I need to have one
> recognised syntax. At the moment there are two and Stu seems to
> be suggesting that they both may be used. I think they should
> bang their heads together until one is dropping out. :-)
The two syntax are a result of the banging of heads. Some people (like
me) are anal about generating documents that actually conform to the
recognised DTDs (I want my documents to still have a chance of working
reasonably in 10 years time and coding to the HTML 2.0/3.2 DTDs is a way
of helping assure that). This leads to a kludge for DC metadata as the
HTML 2.0/3.2 DTD's META element isn't as expressive as it could be. The
other camp are all for adding in extra attributes to the META element
(such as LANG and SCHEME) which makes embedded DC metadata cleaner but
breaks the conformance with the standard DTD.
The compromise is to provide a format for the anal people who are using
HTML 2.0/3.2 documents whilst suggesting SCHEME and LANG attributes to
others that don't mind so much. Note that this will all become a moot
point before too long as the next W3C recommended DTD will have a more
expressive META element (metadata is becoming big news inside the W3C;
there's recently been alot of talk by some W3C Gods-at-large about
metadata and self-describing knowledge in web pages. Over to Brian Kelly
for more info from behind the iron curtain... :-) )
The bottom line is that the current anal kludge is a temporary fix and
will hopefully be unnecessary within a year (my estimate for Courgar, the
next W3C HTML DTD to appear).
> Clearly at WoPEc the
> initial stage is to augement the existing descriptive pages
> of papers with DC material. That can be done if we have a
> precise syntax and a registry of official qualifiers
> is operating. I have been pleading for the latter for a long
> time, and contributed to Jon's efforts. I think that they
> have later been superseeded (?) by the Canberra qualifiers.
I haven't really updated by DC qualifiers document since the Canberra
meeting, partly because I've not had much else to put in it but mainly
because I understand that there are a couple of breakout groups from
Canberra working on this now. I'm more than happy for them to do this as
I'm a techie computer scientist and my draft was merely produced
originally to concentrate people's minds; it really needs to be pulled to
bits and put back together by real library types as that's what they
specialise in (I'll stick to the Perl code!). I'm still very much in
favour of a well known DC qualifiers that are registered somewhere though
(just as the DC elements themselves are registered).
> But not yet to keep more complicated metadata for a resource that is
> a collection of digital objects. I think the Warwick framework is
> supposed to be used for this, but I have not seen an implementation
> that would demonstrate to me how it works.
The Warwick Framework has gotten rather sidelined until now as it has been
perceived by most people to be more valuable to expend their effort
getting Dublin Core itself ship-shape. This may well change now that DC
is settling down a bit.
Tatty bye,
Jim'll
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|