Re: communicaton about Turtle compatibility

+1 to everything.

Might also be worth pointing out that “standard” Turtle can serialize RDF 2004 graphs and RDF 1.1 graphs.

Best,
Richard


On 12 May 2012, at 20:52, Sandro Hawke wrote:

> What's our story on versioning (backward and forward compatibility) for
> the Turtle language?
> 
> I think it's:
> 
> 1. There are various "pre-standard" turtle parsers out there; they're
> going to have to be changed to handle new "standard" turtle, which has
> some new bits.
> 
> 2. There are various "pre-standard" turtle documents out there; they'll
> be handled by some "pre-standard" parsers and all standard parsers
> (unless they're really, really strange).
> 
> 3. If someone (including W3C RDF WG) wants to add extensions to Turtle,
> or somehow make a different version, they have to call it something
> different and give it a different media-type (not text/turtle) and
> suffix (not .ttl).
> 
> In other words, there will only ever be one "true" version of Turtle.
> There will never be a Turtle 1.1, and if there is ever a "Turtle 2" it
> will formally be a different language, with different documents,
> different parsers, and different media types.   If Turtle 2 is an
> extension of Turtle, then Turtle 2 parsers can claim the Turtle mime
> type as well and also handle Turtle (.ttl) documents.
> 
> This is sensible, I think, and I can't think of a better plan.  I don't
> think it's worthwhile to somehow put a version flag in the document
> text, or to have some kind of "ignore stuff you don't understand" rule
> like HTML and CSS.   So I'm not suggesting changing anything in the
> language.
> 
> It might be helpful to say something in the introduction or SOTD about
> how we've tried to be backward compatible with existing pre-standard
> Turtle documents.   (We don't need to say there is no forward
> compatibility, since that would just confuse nearly everyone.)  I think
> this is something people are going to want to know.  It might just be
> something we say in the various news announcements, but I wouldn't mind
> seeing it acknowledge even in the Abstract.
> 
>   -- Sandro
> 
> 
>

Received on Sunday, 13 May 2012 13:07:35 UTC