Re: What is the nature of HTML 4.0? was RE: Proposal for new RDDLnaturesand purpose

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@dyomedea.com>]

Jonathan Borden wrote:
> 
> Eric van der Vlist wrote:
> >
> >
> > I'd like to propose a new "purpose" for RDDL that would be something
> > like "alternative representation" (I think that it's slightly different
> > than a "normative resource") and new natures that would cover commonly
> > used formats (xhtml, html, wml, svg, ... as well as RDF).
> 
> XHTML is easy to assign a nature to, HTML is not so obvious in my mind:
> 
> XHTML
> nature: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
> 
> (in this case the namespace of the root element, namely 'html' is a good URI
> to use as the 'nature' of XHTML.)
> 
> HTML
> 
> should the nature be the URI of its specification?
> 
> -- http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/
> 
> or should the nature be the well-known URI of its content-type: text/html
> -- http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/html

Would be nice to get a RDDL at this location ;=) !

> or should the nature be something from the DOCTYPE e.g. strict.dtd?
> 
> -- http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd
> 
> normally I don't like to use a specification as a nature, but in this case
> the specification directory is also the root directory of the DTDs...

I guess it's also depending on how precise we want to be in the
description of the nature...

Do we want to differentiate HTML4 vs HTML3 ?
Do we want to differentiate HTML4 strict vs HTML4 transitional ?

> >
> > My first motivation is to allow to specify the location of a RDF
> > document that would be equivalent to the RDDL (in case its publisher
> > would like to provide it).
> 
> this is the motivation behind RDDL itself, to allow the specification of
> resources that provide either alternate representations of or schemata that
> describe a namespace as well as other resources such as code, stylesheets,
> transforms etc.


The nature of a RDF document would obviously be
"http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#", then.

What do you think of a new "alternative representation" purpose ? and
what URL should we give it ?
 
Thanks

Eric

> >
> > I have also noticed that using XHTML or HTML namespaces as the nature of
> > resource seems to be a common practice and I think it should be
> > documented.
> 
> the resources you refer to are specifications that are intended to be human
> readable.
> 
> >
> > There is also a decision to take for these types of document about using
> > the URI of their mime types or their namespace URI.
> >
> 
> In general when the root namespace URI is adequate to describe the nature of
> a resource this is the prefered nature.
> 
> Yet this doesn't always work for example a RDDL document itself has a root
> element namespace of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml but this doesn't alone
> describe the nature of a RDDL document. For a RDDL document:
> http://www.rddl.org/ best describes its nature (from this URI a user or
> program can get many many resources with which to manipulate it).
> 
> When a document isn't XML (and hence can't have a root namespace URI) its
> well-known media type URI may serve as the nature.
> 
> -Jonathan

-- 
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Eric van der Vlist       Dyomedea                    http://dyomedea.com
http://xmlfr.org         http://4xt.org              http://ducotede.com
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