RDFa Last Call Comment: garbage collecting "useless" triples doesn't seem necessary and could hurt authors as they write RDFa

• From: Ben Adida <ben@adida.net>
• Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:38:34 -0700
• To: RDFa <public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <47E1C01A.8020501@adida.net>

Hi team,

I struggled for a while regarding whether to bring up this issue as a 
Last Call Comment, but I do think it's worth considering.

I don't believe it is necessary, and it may be harmful, to garbage 
collect so-called "useless" triples in cases like:

<div rel="foaf:knows">
   <div rel="foaf:knows">
     <div rel="foaf:knows">
       ...
     </div>
   </div>
</div>

So what if someone writes useless triples? That's their intent, so let 
it be :) This step in the processing adds notable complexity to the 
parser rules. It also may make life difficult for authors who are 
progressively writing RDFa, building up a skeleton of bnodes before 
hanging properties onto them: they wouldn't see any triples at all until 
they add a @property, at which point a slew of triples would appear.

There's a notable cost here, and questionable value.

-Ben

Received on Thursday, 20 March 2008 01:39:09 UTC