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

I was guilty in raising this issue a long time ago:-( and, somehow, it 
made it into the document after all.

I must say that my comment at this point is awfully non-technical and 
very pragmatic:-( Yes, this created complications on the processing 
rules and, for example, Mark & co. had to pay a heavy price for it as 
editors:-). But it is done. If we decide to roll back on that, this 
means a non-editorial change on the document, ie, we will have to issue 
a second last call and delay closure of RDFa. I am not sure what is 
better for the community at this point...

I know. This is an awfully administrative and non-technical reaction, 
but I had to raise this:-)

Ivan

Ben Adida wrote:
> 
> 
> 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
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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