Re: Quick edit

[ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)]

Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net> writes:

> > > (mind you, with every day that goes by, I'm becoming more in favor of
> > > nuking content-type, but let's see what other people say).
> >
> > Yeah I've been reconsidering this also. ...
> > we could to a http://www.rddl.org/content-types.htm RDDL which stuffs the
> > content-type in the xlink:title and maps based on that.
> 
> I've created http://www.rddl.org/content-type.htm. But also I've placed a
> few resources at the bottom of the spec http://www.rddl.org/.


<snip/>

I've been watching the RDDL development with interest and optimism,
and finally had a look at the current draft of your (joint) work [1].

Although I think it's basically great, and I think definitely worth
pursuing, there's one aspect of this which has crept in un-noticed at
least by me, and I've been reading the threads pretty carefully:

  "xlink:arcrole

        The value of this attribute must be supplied and must a URI
        reference. It provides a machine-readable identifier for the
        type of the related resource. Software perfoming resource
        resolution may dispatch on the this value."

so far so good

        "When the related resource is an XML namespace compliant
        document and when the resource can be distinguished by the
        namespace of the root element, this namespace URI can be used
        as the value of the xlink:arcrole attribute."

right, except replace 'can' by 'must' (see below)

        "It is anticipated that many related-resource types will be
        well known. A list of well-known resource types may be found
        at http://www.rddl.org/arcrole.htm (which itself is an RDDL
        directory)."

OK, but why doesn't this file include the relevant namespace URIs, for 
use as the value of 'arcrole' as the first two paragraphs suggest?

        "The well known names defined in arcrole.htm are specifications
        which they name."

Hunh?  I can't make _any_ sense of this sentence.  When I go to
arcroles.htm [2], I find statements such as

  "The URI http://www.rddl.org/arcrole.htm#RELAX can be used as a
  well-known URI for RELAX."

Why are you proliferating names which are _not_ well known, when
perfectly good ones exist, e.g. "http://www.xml.gr.jp/xmlns/relaxCore"?
The whole point of the RDDL exercise is lost if software has to keep
up with an arbitrary set of made-up URIs to identify resource types:
please identify _existing_ namespace URIs whenever possible, and open
discussion on this list for alternatives when no obvious candidate
exists (e.g. for CSS).

ht

[1] http://www.openhealth.org/RDDL/
[2] http://www.openhealth.org/RDDL/arcrole.htm
-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
          W3C Fellow 1999--2001, part-time member of W3C Team
     2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
	    Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
		     URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/