Firstly, let me introduce myself as a new member, and say hi to all.

I am (v.slowly) beginning to grasp the RDF syntax & schema specs,
primarily due to an open source project I want to get underway.
However there are a number of concepts that I would appreciate help
resolving.

Having read Sean Palmer's "A Semantic Web Hypertext System" document,
I am beginning to wonder whether one of my particular issues is the
"exception that proves the rule" regarding "explicit reification" as
he put it.

Much of the (meta)data my application will return to a client UI has
very little benefit of being in xhtml format. Infact, I'm not sure I
actually want the implicit content structure that xhtml would enforce.

This is especially true since I have discovered that CSS in RDF works
as expected (I was surprised I confess), and achieves the
presentational requirments of that data, therefore why go to the
bother of htmlising it, rather than just leaving it as xml. However,
two other requirements, lead me to question whether the above approach
is correct.

Firstly, providing a link within the rdf data ( as in html:a ) to
force the user agent to generate a standard hyperlink. I had thought
I could just add [ xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" ] my rdf
namespace and all would work. However validating doesn't and for some
reasion neither does this: [ <html:a html:href="standard_uri.rdf"
html:type="application/rdf+xml">...more rdf data</html:a> ] unless I
remove the [ html:href ] no UA sees the href attribute as a hyperlink.
So here I have no idea if I'm just completely wrong, this is even
allowed, or even Mozilla just isn't upto snuff yet ;-)

Secondly, part of my intention was to merge multiple rdf sources into
a single one, each source could provide it's own CSS stylesheet for
the data it provided. I had intended to prefix each sources data with
it's stylesheet [ <?xml-stylesheet href="rdf.css" type="text/css"?> ]
until I realised it was a PI as far as XML was concerned and so had
the same restrictions as html's <link> attribute. So this then
apparently forces a) a separate CSS/RDF source, or a more intelligent
merge process to declare the stylesheets at the beginning of the rdf
doc - neither I'm particlarly keen on.

So should rdf be embedded in xhtml, or is there a satifactory way to
"link" and "style" rdf datastreams?

Cheers,

Neil