Best-practice-standard-prefix-names

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Using Standard Prefix Names in RDFa

It is considered a best-practice to use standard prefix names in RDFa so that other authors can read your XHTML+RDFa easily if they so desire. This practice is similar in concept to logically and expressively naming your namespaces and variables in a programming language in such a way that other developers may understand what each namespace and variable means.

Standard Vocabulary Prefixes

Here are a list of standard prefixes and their target URL:

Reasoning

Humans like to group and name things. In order for us to communicate clearly, we must be able to call an object or concept something specific. Let us take the example of an 'apple'. An English-speaking society would say that an object that is edible, crunchy, red, has a core with seeds in it, sweet and grows on a tree is an apple, then when someone in that society refers to an 'apple', an English-speaker would know the concept that they are describing.

If someone were to then point at what an English-speaker would call an apple, and call it 'pomme', one would become confused. They would be confused because 'pomme' is not the word for 'apple' in English, it is the word for 'apple' in French.

Similarly, if one were to use a different prefix for RDF namespaces in a document than what was common practice, it would be confusing to those that read the XHTML+RDFa. Take this XHTML snippet for example: 

<p about="#mywork" property="a:license">Copyright 2008</p>

Someone reading the text above wouldn't know which vocabulary the author intended without searching through the document for the prefix definition. Not using standard vocabulary prefixes is considered bad form.

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