discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 12:57 +0100, Sylvain Zimmer wrote:
> We use this for music albums, so there's one <Work> for each track, that 
> usually means a lot of RDF...
> 
> Moreover, I've got some problems with utf8/iso8859. Currently, we give 
> our artists the utf8-encoded rdf and tell them to put it in their 
> websites. But as most of their pages are in iso8859, there are some 
> validation issues.
> 
> Example : 
> http://validator.creativecommons.org/validate.py?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpcmontigny.free.fr%2Fliens%2Fliens.html&submit=Parse+URI
> 
> We can't ask them whether their pages are in utf8 or iso or whatever, 
> it's too complicated.

The validator should probably be more tolerant in this respect, at least
providing a warning instead of blowing up.  If you copy & paste the RDF
into http://w3.org/RDF/Validator it is ok.

You could aggressively escape to get around the encoding problem
altogether.

> So it would be ideal to host the rdf ourselves and 
> just give them a simple HTML bit linking to it.

I can see the advantages of hosting the RDF yourself regardless of
encoding.

> We can't really use the 
> a rel=license I think, because it's not the page that's CC-licensed, 
> it's the album... right ?

It isn't precise or accurate, but it is useful, telling Yahoo and Google
that CC licensed content is to be found here, which indeed it can, just
maybe not the page itself.

> I don't really mind yahoo/google not supporting a rel=meta currently, as 
> long as it's an official way to do it (so they should add support for it 
> in the future.).
> 
> So what are your thoughts on this ? Is a rel=meta okay ? Can you think 
> of a better way to solve our problem ?

Well, a solution that will probably never be read is a non-solution
obviously.  I suspect rel="meta" is that.  Another problem is that <a
rel="meta"> is human readable/clickable, and it isn't much help to link
directly to an RDF file in this way.  Or were you planning to link to a
page that itself embeds or <link>s to RDF? (Looking again at your
original post, I see style="display:none", hmm.)

One possibly useful solution would be to begin using
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2005-rdfa-syntax

Maybe   
<a rel="rdfs:seeAlso" href="http://jamendo.com/foo/bar.html";>xyz</a>

Or if you want it to be invisible
<link rel="rdfs:seeAlso" href="http://jamendo.com/foo/bar.rdf"/>

-- 
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/about/people#21