[rdfweb-dev] how to say "I Made This!"

Tue Jul 22 09:41:50 UTC 2003

On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 17:49, Earle Martin wrote:
> Organization: Strike Force for Indolence and Spiritual Beauty
> 
> > On 21 Jul 2003, Edd Dumbill wrote:
> > > Been thinking we need this for a while in FOAF.  Problem space is
> > > linking to a page's author, described as FOAF, from an HTML page.
> > > As there are no semantics are than "link" from the current
> > > rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" setup, we need
> > > something more.
> 
> I came across the following:
> http://www.amk.ca/xml/foaf-author.html
> 
> Is the "profile" attribute for the head sections of HTML documents in common
> usage? I've never seen it before.

Nor have I.  I'm not altogether sure about this approach.  I worry that
the "profile" attribute is new and strange enough to freak people and/or
require substantive changes to authoring tools.

As I understand it from the docs, these are used to indicate a "default
namespace" for the names in the <meta> tags.  However, it seems a bit
loosely defined.  For a start, only one profile is permitted per <head>
section.  This means that if people use this, we're co-opting all of
their <meta> tags into our FOAF profile, which really doesn't seem
desirable.  I favor the Dublin Core's namespace-like "schema.FOAF"
approach as it allows a multiplicity of namespaces.  (This is, of
course, fitting angels on the head of a surface mounted resistor.)

My personal goals for this are to get something easy enough to cut and
paste from FOAFamatic into your page, yet not so dumb that we are unable
to extend it in the future.

-- 
Edd Dumbill.  More from me at <http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog>
Managing Editor, XML.com, XMLhack.com; Chair, XML Europe 2003