Re: [office-metadata] RDFa model and xml:id

[Svante Schubert <Svante.Schubert@Sun.COM>]

> Unfortunately, I can't say the same about your proposal because you have
> not explicitly stated on the mailing list or wiki. 
Correct. I have not the advantage to skip the design and take an 
implementation out of the hat.
That's why I wanted to discuss design aspects and not the whole coding 
first.
But sure you are right two implementation are better to compare. Have 
you noticed my approach to discuss such a proposal with Patrick on the list?
> You have made mentioned
> of xml:id, xpointer-based stuff, xpath stuff, styles-based stuff and more
> recently binding a la XForms stuff.
A nice set, isn' it, but styles-based is the odd man. Never argued for this.
>  Which one is it? Please understand that
> in order for us to compare things scientifically we need to see a proposal
> in an email or wiki addressing the use cases.
>   
Do you design by comparing implementations or do you design by comparing 
design aspects by weighting scenarios?
>> How can we compare the approaches in a more scientific manner?
>>     
>>> * I'm actually more comfortable with using the style redirection that
>>> Florian likes to indicate properties than the xml:id approach for this
>>> very reason (keep the package RDF files standard and clean). But that
>>> would still involve a meta:property and/or meta:class attribute on the
>>> style definition, in which case it's effectively XML window dressing.
>>>
>>>       
>> Do we all agree on the saying that good design is a modular design?
>> If there are two parts like style and semantic, which sometimes might go
>> together - as when a content of a certain semantic is formatted by a
>> certain style - but usually are handled separately, a modular design
>> would not interleave them, but handle them separately to avoid
>> unnecessary dependencies.
>>     
>
> I think you are stretching the analogy a tiny bit. You are saying that
> because in general a modular design is well-received that it means that
> content needs to be separated into two files. Is CSS a modular design? Are
> microformats a modular design? Are XML namespaces a modular design? Is HTML
> a modular design? Is RDFa a modular design? There I just pointed to five
> well known and (one not so well-known) standards that *are* considered
> modular yet the content is on a single file.
>
>   

You should not level RDFa yet aside of CSS, miroformats, XML namespace, 
HTML.
It is not a Standard, not a W3C Working Draft, no roadmap, by this not 
even on the way of becoming a standard.
Aside of this RDFa interleaves datatypes with the content, which is 
quite the opposite of being modular.

By picking CSS, yes the reason for separating the CSS styles from the 
content - to be able to handle different things separately - should be 
the same reason for us to separate Styles and Semantic.

How would you describe your way to decide if something is a good design 
or a bad design?

Best regards,
Svante