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RDF+CSS vs XHTML

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RDF+CSS vs XHTML
• From: "Neil Stansbury" <Neil.Stansbury@m...>
• Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 18:23:55 +0100

Firstly, let me introduce myself as a new member, and say hi to all.

I am (slowly) beginning to grasp the RDF syntax & schema specs,
primarily due to an open source project I want to get underway. However
there are a number of concepts that I would appreciate help resolving.

Having read Sean Palmer's "A Semantic Web Hypertext System"
(http://www.mysterylights.com/sbp/adotsw/) document, I am beginning to
wonder whether one of my particular issues is the "exception that proves
the rule" regarding "explicit reification" as
he put it.

Much of the (meta)data my application will return to a client UI has
very little benefit of being in xhtml format. Infact, I'm not sure I
actually want the implicit content structure that xhtml would enforce.

This is especially true since I have discovered that CSS in RDF works as
expected (I was surprised I confess), and achieves the presentational
requirments of that data, therefore why go to the bother of htmlising
it, rather than just leaving it as xml. However, two other requirements,
lead me to question whether the above approach is correct.

Firstly, providing a link within the rdf data ( as in html:a ) to force
the user agent to generate a standard hyperlink. I had thought I could
just add [ hmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" ] to my rdf
namespace and all would work fine. However validating doesn't, and for
some reasion neither does this: [ <html:a html:href="standard_uri.rdf"
html:type="application/rdf+xml">...more rdf data</html:a> ] unless I
remove the [ html:href ] no UA sees the href attribute as a hyperlink. 
So here I have no idea if I'm just completely wrong, this is even
allowed, or even Mozilla isn't up to snuff yet ;-)

Secondly, part of my intention was to merge multiple rdf sources into a
single one, each source could provide it's own CSS stylesheet for the
data it provided. I had intended to prefix each sources data with it's
stylesheet [ <?xml-stylesheet href="rdf.css" type="text/css"?> ] until I
realised it was a PI as far as XML was concerned and so had the same
restrictions as html's <link> attribute. So this then
apparently forces a) a separate CSS/RDF source, or a more intelligent
merge process to declare the stylesheets at the beginning of the rdf doc
- neither I'm particlarly keen on.

So should rdf be embedded in xhtml, or is there a satifactory way to
"link" and "style" rdf datastreams?

Cheers,

Neil

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