Re: [office-metadata] naming schema

[Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@gmail.com>]

On Feb 21, 2007, at 8:11 AM, Florian Reuter wrote:

> When I understood you correctly you prefer the ID way.
>
> What I tried to do is to present a ways to "generate unique IDs". 
> Sure, we can simply say the a ID is a URI. But why not use a naming 
> schema to generate unique IDs?
>
> I understand that using the "opaque identifiers" identifiers give you 
> a simply direct relationsship:
>
> ODF entity + URI id   <====> RDF statement about URI id
>
> My goal is to establish relationships differently:
>
> ODF enitity + style name <====> naming schema which maps between style 
> names and URI <===> RDF statement about URI
>
> I understand that this is no longer an "opaque identifier". What I 
> don't get is why this is soooo bad :-) In fact I thought that would be 
> particulary clever :-)

I think you've walked yourself through most of an explanation: there 
are already good URI (and other ID) schemes that are known to work well 
(UUIDs and such), so why would we invent some new one, particularly one 
based on natural language strings and such?

But then you shift gears and want to say "no, identifiers should not be 
opaque; they should be meaningful". It's actually more than that they 
are "no longer 'opaque identifiers'" (as if it's just an accident).

So I would turn this around and ask why you would possibly want to do 
this? We can achieve the exact same thing by allowing an optional 
meta:class attribute on styles.

But that presumes we allow it elsewhere too, which is why I wanted us 
to solve the core proposal first.

Bruce