Re: CURIE proposal ...

On 22 Apr 2008, at 17:49, Michael Kifer wrote:
>> On 22 Apr 2008, at 16:08, Michael Kifer wrote:
>>>
>>>> My point is that a halfway stop is no good. Either have a fully
>>>> specced Presentation Syntax or use the XML directly.
>>>
>>> Yeah! Write semantics using XML and then come back.
>> [snip]
>>
>> Dude, it's a disjunction. I know you don't like disjunctions, but
>> that's no reason to ignore them.
>
> I love disjunctions. I see that you did not understand what I said,  
> so I
> will explain it formally.
>
> You: a \/ b.
> Me:  ~b.

You may have thought you were doing that, but you weren't. Sorry. At  
least, your implicature failed. If you wanted to say not B, then you  
shouldn't have made it an imperative.

  In fact, afaict, you embrace ~a as well.

Plus, I never said what I embrace. I just warned that having a  
presentation syntax raises certain expectations, however hard you try  
to squash them.

>> My point is that if you have a presentation syntax, people *will* use
>> it and treat it as a concrete syntax no matter what warnings you put
>> up. Surely your experience with recent comments confirms this.
>
> Are you talking to me?

Yes:
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-rules/2008Apr/0031.html

"""The presentation syntax, which is used there is
for the purpose of giving definitions and semantics, since it is clearly
not possible to use XML for that.

This does not close the door to the introduction of another human- 
readable
syntax, but, at least for now, the group has decided against that.   
It is
likely that the presentation syntax will be "slightly concretized" to
simplify the job of writing test cases and such. But it is much less  
likely
that this concretized version will become normative."""


>> Finally, I don't think writing a semantics using XML (e.g., if one
>> uses RELAX NG's compact syntax) is so bad.

See below. Plus, we may be doing this for OWL. I'll let you know how  
it works out.

> Let me repeat: come back when you are done.
>
>> I understand you prefer
>> not to, which is fine.

See above.

>> But then don't bitch when people want the
>> presentation to be a (readable) concrete syntax.
>
> You are utterly confused.

If by "you" you mean *you*, then I agree :)

> I was bitching?

	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-rules/2008Apr/0029.html

"""It would have been helpful if you were a bit more specific, but  
you should
understand that FLD is a logic framework, and it uses notation typically
found in any logic textbook. FLD's (and BLD's) presentation syntax is
abstract syntax designed to describe the formal semantics. This
presentation syntax is missing several important aspects of a concrete
language -- on purpose. This nature of the syntax is stressed at  
least twice
in each document. The concrete language is XML."""

I started this conversation with a friendly observation about the  
experience of having a so called abstract syntax for specification  
purposes (and if you don't like giving a semantics in terms of xml,  
try doing it in terms of rdf :)). I'm not sure why you decided to go  
postal on my ass, but you shouldn't be surprised when people kick back.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 22 April 2008 17:16:47 UTC