[uf-new] Re: hTurtle: A GRDDL-Compatible Microformat for Turtle-in-HTML

[Sean B. Palmer]

Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:

> 1. Invisible data.  The data in comments is invisible.

Oh dear. You should tell that to whoever wrote this section:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/scripts.html#h-18.3.2

It's not invisible to the XML Infoset, or the DOM, or SAX parsers, or
XSLT, or regular expressions, or so on, which is how hTurtle is able
to meet its requirements.

hTurtle's requirements mightn't align with those stated in The
Process, of course. See my message to Scott for more about that.

(I've been told that "data" is a plural, incidentally!)

> 2. Comment hack.  Comments and their contents aren't markup.

What about QNames in attribute values? If I'd been using an SGML
NOTATION section or something then I'd understand your concern—or The
Process's concern.

Masahide Kanzaki has one of my favourite examples of exploiting the
joy of comments:

http://www.kanzaki.com/parts/xsltdoc.xsl

I agree that it's a crap way to do it in HTML, but then that's
grafting arms onto the HTML hamburger for you.

> 3. Violating DRY.

Okay, this is a point that I utterly concede. It's absolutely stupid
to have to repeat the information, and that's a poor demonstration of
hTurtle. I couldn't think of anything else that was as simple and yet
shows clearly what it does.

In actual use one might be providing a machine readable form of say
prose describing the model of an RDF Schema. Of course you can go from
the RDF to the HTML rather than embedding the RDF in the HTML, but I'm
not saying that hTurtle is an especially good idea as a format. It
does, speaking from an engineering point of view, work, however. You
get triples from it.

> 4. Premature naming. "DO NOT start with even labeling your
> effort "hXYZ". This is a very common mistake."

I think I addressed this in my reply to Scott. Please let me know if I didn't.

When someone pointed out that I'd got replies on microformats-new,
they did it by saying "you've awoken the Tantek!", which I think is
coded speak for you've elicited a rare reply from a supreme honcho. I
still owe you a big one for your forgiveness after I tore the design
of your weblog a new ass when in fact you were just adapting common
designs to be standards compliant.

So now I owe you two big ones.

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/