I guess I was confused by the primer. I wait expectantly for the next draft of the syntax document for the exact rules that describe the Primer’s Section 5. Hopefully, that’ll clarify the questions I have… and if I still have any confusion, I’ll definitely post comments on the taskforce mailing list.

Thanks,
Ben

Some quick points.

First, the nested layers are actually very easy to parse. But most importantly, they have a simple generic structure, which means RDFa doesn’t suffer from the problems you’ll see in microformats, when ‘layers’ are needed (for example, when a number of people share the same address by working for the same company).

Note that this is what you might call an ‘advanced’ feature, since simply adding your own FOAF details to a document, or marking up some event, will not need this kind of technique. But even so, I believe this is about the simplest way it could be done in XHTML.

Second, you don’t get the triples you describe, i.e., ‘Tim’ is the author of <http://example.com/mydoc#section>, exactly as you expected. This is because the rel attribute is on a separate element to the id attribute, so follows the normal rules, and these are that the subject is the main document, or the nearest about attribute.

Having said all of this, the fact that the primer can be misunderstood in this way leads me to ask if you could post some comments to the RDF in XHTML Taskforce mailing-list, pointing out where the ambiguities are. That would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Mark