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Re: Media Types, Purposes, Natures, and XSL Transforms


purposes of media
Jonathan Borden (jonathan@o...) wrote:
> Eric Hanson wrote:
> >> Furthermore the semantics of RDDL's purpose differ from
> >> Typekit's  purpose in case of a transform. RDDL uses the
> >> purpose to indicate the result's  type, while Typekit
> >> indicates the result's purpose. IMHO such subtle  semantic
> >> differences should be avoided in case of two similar specs
> >> -  especially since they complement each other quite
> >> nicely.
> >
> > +1 for getting them the same.
> >
> > I'm not a big fan of how RDDL overloads nature/purpose to
> > include info like this.  IMHO, nature should indicate what a
> > resource *is*, purpose what it *does*, in general terms,
> > without indicating any specifics.  Everything else should be
> > external.
> 
> Fair enough. I was making the assumption that one can *infer*
> that  something that *is* an XSLT *does* a transform but
> indeed it is  overloading what would otherwise be a
> rddl:nature (of the result) with  a rddl:purpose (i.e. that
> the purpose of a transform is to produce  something with the
> nature of the result) If that makes any sense ...  perhaps
> not.
>
> I should point out that the way this is described in the RDDL
> spec is  *explicitly* being used as an *example*.  RDDL 7.14:
> " XSLT Stylesheet
> 
> An example of an XSLT stylesheet for RDDL, which accepts the
> params  role and arcrole. The transform inserts the document
> referenced by  xlink:href in the output. This code is shown as
> an example and is not  normative.  "
> 
> I.e. the RDDL spec does not mandate that nature and purpose be
> used  this way with XSLT, rather offers an example of how
> nature and purpose  *might* be used with XSLT.

Another point of divergence.  


It seems to me that RDDL is designed to do something, and I'm
trying to use it to do something else entirely.  Just to recap,
and correct me if I got anything wrong here, but:

RDDL doesn't mandate the way that resources are described, where
with Typekit, developing a standard is precisely the point of
the spec.

RDDL is human readable, but for Typekit's uses, human
readability is totally pointless.

RDDL doesn't need to specify the namespace it's associated with
because it's deployed at the namespace URI.  Typekit docs will
need to include it.

Given these differences, I think developing Typekit as a
seperate spec makes sense.

However, the two specs do have a complimentary nature, and I
think getting at least the resource descriptions the same would
be good idea.  Like you say just use the rddl:nature and
rddl:purpose vocab.

From my perspective, nature and purpose have a general
usefulness that extends beyond the scope of RDDL.  How about
abstracting these from RDDL and making them the basis of a
stand-alone way of describing resources that support XML data?

The first acronym that comes to mind for this is, well, RDF. :-)
Which makes me think I'm trying to reinvent a wheel here without
knowing it.  If so, someone place club me with the clue stick,
but as far as I can tell, this isn't what RDF does.

Eric

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