ISSUE-19 (Default generation of XMLLiterals): Should RDFa 1.1 generate XMLLiterals or plain literals for content that contains elements [RDFa 1.1 Core]

ISSUE-19 (Default generation of XMLLiterals): Should RDFa 1.1 generate XMLLiterals or plain literals for content that contains elements [RDFa 1.1 Core]

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/19

Raised by: Manu Sporny
On product: RDFa 1.1 Core

The RDFa 1.0 specification states that RDFa processors should generate XMLLiterals for content that contains elements and does not contain a datatype. For example, the following markup would generate an XML Literal:

  <span property="foaf:name">Albert <strong>Einstein</strong></span>

whose value would be:

<>
   foaf:name
      "Albert <strong>Einstein</strong>"^^rdf:XMLLiteral

Anecdotal evidence via deployment experience has shown that this is a common authoring mistake and that most authors do not intend to generate XMLLiterals when there is no @datatype specified. We need to collect a statistically significant sample set to determine if this is true and if so, ensure that plain literals are generated instead of XMLLiterals.

This approach could affect backwards-compatibility if there is no @version specifier on the document, so the change should be considered carefully as it could negatively impact large deployments that depend on XMLLiteral generation.

Google or Yahoo should be able to do the statistical analysis on the frequency that XMLLiterals are generated.

Received on Monday, 1 March 2010 04:05:44 UTC