Andy,
On Fri, 23 Nov 2001Andy Powell wrote:
>
> My personal view is that DCMI would benefit from aligning its encoding
> mechanisms somewhat. Currently people see dc:title in RDF/XML and
> expect to be able to use dc:title or DC.title in HTML meta tags. Or
> they see DC.Title in meta tags and expect to encode dc:Title in XML.
> Now, one might argue that they are plain stupid for doing this, but I
> can understand the confusion and think it is the fault of our specs.
>
I agree that there should be some consistency of naming between HTML,
xhtml (where lowercase may be expected), XML and RDF. However, I think
one should remember that those who are encoding in HTML are probably
not plain stupid but confused, and could be even more confused if you
suggest a change from DC.Title to dc:title. People encoding in HTML are
simply tagging their web pages with DC metadata. They have understood DC
at a 'simple' level and will not understand the niceties of XML namespaces.
So I would agree that a document describing encoding DC in (x)HTML should
state that <meta name="dc:title".../> is the expected use, but it should
also mention the historical 'DC.Title'.
>
> I think that there would be some benefit in moving to the same
> situation in the HTML meta encoding and in plain XML. I.e. we should
> move to the situation where
> <meta name="dcterms:temporal" content="...">
> is the preferred form in HTML meta tags (acknowledging that we
> continue to allow existing usage as well so as not to break stuff)
>
This is where I think you are really going to confuse people
encoding DC in HTML, because they will not know what 'dcterms'
(aka dcq and dct) means, and I think will be disinclined to use it.
However, I think 'dc:temporal" would be used, however much it
breaks the DC elements/terms model.
I also think it depends which element you're talking about.
'temporal' may be fairly intuitive to use without 'coverage', but
DC.Date.issued is more intuitive than dcterms:issued.
> To summarise... I think that the more consistency we can achieve
> between our syntax encodings the better. And that all our encoding
> syntaxes should treat element refinements in the same way as elements
> (as the current RDF/XML encoding does).
>
So yes, I agree that encodings should be consistent. But this is
really just a plea to remember that those who are encoding in
HTML probably will not understand the niceties of the DC
elements/terms model or XML namespaces and just want to be
told what to write.
Ann
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Mrs. Ann Apps. Senior Analyst - Research & Development, MIMAS,
University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 0161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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