287762 - [RDF] Help system should use dublin core where possible

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Help Viewer, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel O'Connor]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

http://lxr.mozilla.org/aviary101branch/source/browser/components/help/locale/en-US/firebird-index1.rdf#9
http://lxr.mozilla.org/aviary101branch/source/browser/components/help/locale/en-US/firebird-toc.rdf#9
http://lxr.mozilla.org/aviary101branch/source/browser/components/help/locale/en-US/firebirdhelp.rdf#9

The Dublin Core xmlns should be utilised here. Use Dublin Core's dc:title
instead of nc:name, rdf:resource instead of nc:link.

See also: 12161

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Steffen Wilberg]

Why? What's the benefit?

Comment 2

[Daniel O'Connor]

Mostly, this is tech evangalism.

Suppose there was a generic, RDF datastore of some description (MIT's <a
href="http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/index.html">piggybank</a> comes to mind,
or perhaps Jena). If the firefox help system ended up being "scuttered", and you
were searching for information, you would probably <a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/">conduct a query</a> looking for
the dublin core title elements, as well as dublin core description elements.

If that's the case, and there's nothing in place to assert that NC:name and
NC:link are the same as dc:title and rdf:resource, this information is
effectively lost - it requires our RDF datastore to know, ahead of time, that
NC:name is a descriptive label.

Another approach to this is to track down and label all of the uses of the NC
namespace, turning it into a proper ontology which asserts equivalence of
certain properties with existing, "well known" ontologies - probably simpler and
far less work.

The disadvantage of this is RDF datastores that are simpler still suffer from
the missing descriptive elements if they don't have capabilities to understand
OWL / RDFS.

The last approach would be to add dublin core elements without otherwise
removing existing ones - that way only the base RDF has to be touched, the
various other source can be left alone. This results merely in information
duplication.
For instance:

<rdf:Seq>
<rdf:li NC:name="Contents" NC:link="toc.html" dc:title="Contents"
rdf:resource="toc.html" />
</rdf:Seq>

Comment 3

[Jeff Walden (gone starting June 8)]

I suppose this is a valid request, but because it adds nothing to the user
experience it's not at all a high priority.  Reassigning to nobody and moving to
help viewer component, however, just in case we decide at some future time that
we want this...