RE: Resource Gloss (Human Readable)

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Charles Reitzel wrote:
>
> On Sun, 31 Dec 2000, Simon St. Laurent wrote:
> >At 11:35 AM 12/31/00 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
> >>Hm... I'd like to force some aspects of HTML down  their throats
> >>to make it clear that it's an expectation that there be some
> >>human-readable documentation. -Tim
> >
> >Fair enough, and I'm utterly sympathetic to that expectation.  I'm just
> >pondering how to make this play somewhat nice with the schema-at-the-URI
> >approach Rick Jelliffe notes as being in the field already.

Take a look at the beginnings of the Java implementation, basicly when a URL
is resolved if the root namespace is XSD schema, that's how we know what's
there... if its XHTML, we parse looking for rddl:resources and act
accordingly.

>
> 1) RDDL looks good, but it directly competes w/ the existing OASIS work
> without offering any significant additional benefit.  I'd suggest

When I first started looking at this problem this is what I thought as well.
Now that I've gotten deeper into the nitty gritties it has become apparent
that the problems are significantly orthogonal.

Essentially RDDL describes a namespace.

SOCATs are particularly helpful when:

1) the namespace URI is not resolvable e.g. a URN, in this case a SOCAT
(assuming a NAMESPACE extension) can map this to a RDDL directory without
needing DNS to resolve.
2) the namespace URI returns a single static resource and the client wants
to work with the namespace as a set of named resources. Again SOCAT can
'redirect' the namespace URI to a RDDL directory.


>
> 2) I don't think you can force anything down anyone's throats on this
> matter.  The NS spec is clear.

yep. that's why we are trying to do a good job. we want people to use this
because it is useful, not because they are being forced to. XML-DEV has no
authority to force anything on everyone, but a great authority to build
consensus.

-Jonathan