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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RDDL and user interface
 Jonathan Borden (jonathan@o...) wrote: > > It's a complex problem that tries to take into account all the > > ways an instance can be used! Such is the nature of > > generalization...less than trivial, and I sure don't have it > > figured out. > > RDDL provides *a* solution to this problem, namely that you resolve the > namespace URI, get back a representation (document) and this tells you > something about the namespace. > > An RDF triple store might provide, assuming some things were worked > out, a different mechanism for finding out about a namespace URI e.g. a > triple store might contain various triples that reference the URI. Before deciding on RDF or any other data format, I think it's important to figure out the structure of a resource description. If a resource can be sufficiently described using a tree structure, forcing users to author it in a graph language would be IMHO a big mistake. I have a lot of thoughts about RDF and why I think many of the benefits of RDF can be achieved in a simpler and more elegant fashion using plain XML with schema languages that lend themselves to extensibility, but I'll try to avoid that rant for as long as possible :) > If you read through the xml-dev archives, we had very early on > considered including a mime-type property -- actually this was my > initial suggestion, but then we decided this was redundant -- the > nature can serve as a URI encoding of a mime-type as is described in > the RDDL document. This is the mime type of the resource itself, no? In the case of a transformation, there is a second mime type for the results of the transformation. This I guess should be refered to as "target mime type", not just mime type. So the only use of target mime type that I can think of is with transformations. There surely are other properties that would describe resources of a certain nature but not be appropriate for other natured resources. It lends itself to greater granularity beyond nature and purpose: All resources have a nature and a purpose, but beyond that maybe the structure of descriptions should be tailored to resources of that nature. > A key, perhaps *the* only unique characteristic of RDDL is that it is > intended to be human readable. If you drop the requirement for human > readability RDDL is an utter waste of time, and you'd be far better of > using RDF directly. But there's still a spec here to be written. Even if RDF was decided upon, there has to be some kind of standardized way to describe resources beyond anyone can say anything about anything. I like RDDL as a starting place, but maybe what I'd like to see is some kind of sister spec for non-human-readable RDDL. Also, if an RDDL doc is decoupled from the namespace URI, yet still expected to be associated with it, it's no longer just a resource directory description. It's a resource directory description /about a namespace/, and it has to include the namespace as part of the doc's data. So maybe it's a different spec all together. Eric 
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