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Toni Uusitalo wrote:
> But I was shocked when I started browsing through RDF syntax spec
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-rdf-syntax-grammar-20030905/ and came to
> 2.5 Property Attributes where it says: "When a property element's
> content is string literal, it may be possible to use it as an XML
> attribute on the containing node element. This can be done for
> multiple properties on the same node element only if the property
> element name is not repeated "...
>
> compared to section 2.4 Empty Property Elements' Example 5 what's
> gained with this "abbreviation" but maybe that "the most horrible
> markup usage award" or something?!
>
It seems that putting literal values into an attribute was motivated by
wanting ordinary browsers not to display them - browsers will normally
display element content even for unknown element types, but will ignore
unknown attributes. So if you wanted to embed rdf data into a web page
and not have it displayed (so as not to confuse a humna reader),
attributes are a convenient way to do so.
As David Megginson said -
"... RDF's flexible syntax is well-designed for embedding in Web pages,
but unfortunately, it turns out that almost no one wants to do that.
... As a result, it might be fair to conclude that RDF's syntactic
flexibility was a kind of premature optimization, a lot of work to
accomodate premature requirements."
Cheers,
Tom P
- References:
- RDF syntax
- From: Toni Uusitalo <toni.uusitalo@luukku.com>
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