Re: rel-license: what does the license apply to? (open issue revisited)

Angus McIntyre wrote:

> I seem to remember one of the microformats has a
poorly-understood
> algorithm for determining the scope of a declaration;
could this be
> reapplied here?

The problem lies deeper than rel-license. The rel attribute
in (X) 
HTML is able to specify a specific element within a page as
its  
"target" (using a fragment identifier), but
doesn't offer the same  
granularity to specify its "source".

XHTML2 (and RDFa, which is basically a "backport"
of XHTML2's  
metadata features to earlier versions of XHTML) solves this
through  
its "about" attribute.

One routes for rel-license to achieve the same trick might
be to  
adopt eRDF, a formulation of competing RDF-in-HTML, which
doesn't  
require adding any additional attributes or elements to the
page. It  
co-opts the "id" attribute to indicate a
"container" for metadata. So:

	<div id="foo">
		<p>Some content.</p>
		<div id="bar">
			<p>Some more content.</p>
			<a rel="license"
href="licence.html">licence</a>
		</div>
	</div>

Here "some more content" is licensed under the
terms of licence.html.

Unfortunately, my experience with implementing eRDF has been
that is  
requires a great amount of thought from the very beginning
of  
designing a page. "id" attributes are too commonly
used in the wild  
to tack on this functionality -- you get unintentional
narrowing of  
the scope of metadata. If a page is written with eRDF in
mind from  
the start, it's just about usable. RDFa is much more
pleasant to use.

I added an example to the licensing-brainstorming a few days
ago  
which goes some way to solving the problem and allowing
authors to  
specify exactly what is under the licence.

http://microf
ormats.org/wiki/licensing- 
brainstorming#Creative_Commons_Vocab

A key feature is that it uses rev=license to link from a
licence  
summary to the licensed work, thus allowing the work to be
targeted  
in more detail (e.g. fragment identifiers can be used), and 

deliberately flying under the radar of existing rel-license
tools.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mailtobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk
>
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