Subject: PaceExtensionConstruct

From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 10:02:16 -0800

-1

Consider this sentence:
  "The construct can be interpreted as a simple property of its
   Subject.  The pair consisting of the namespace-URI of the element
   and the local name of the element can be interpreted as the name of
   the property. "

It will make NO SENSE WHATEVER to someone who isn't hip to the RDF 
nudge-nudge wink-wink.  The term "property" is not defined and thus 
this provides no useful information to implementors.  A vastly better 
approach would be to say:

"In order to facilitate understanding Atom data in RDF terms, elements 
from non-Atom namespaces may only appear as children of Person 
constructs, atom:head, and atom:entry."

Then in an entirely separate document which that proportion of the 
world that simply doesn't care about RDF can ignore entirely, you can 
carefully define exactly what you mean in RDF graph terms without 
having to hint around undefined terms like "property".

I don't think including this in Atom would cause any harm, so I could 
live with it, but I think it fails to meet the goal of providing any 
benefit to the vast majority of implementors and should be left out. 
-Tim

---

From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 13:22:52 -0500

Tim Bray wrote:
> nudge-nudge wink-wink.  The term "property" is not defined and thus this 
> provides no useful information to implementors.  A vastly better 
> approach would be to say:"

The text in PaceHeadless use less hip language to describe things:

"The element can be interpreted as a simple property of the parent 
element that encloses it."

It's just name/value pairs, no understanding of RDF required. This is 
the approach that a vast majority of extensions to RSS1 and RSS2 take. 
It's worth preserving and standardizing. It also helps WebDAV and CMSes 
convert these things to their notion of name/value pairs and properties. 
It would also be a big help when extending the protocol, making it 
simpler to use fields that aren't built in to the server.

Robert Sayre