Why not date=? (was Re: ODF and semantic web)

I really look forward to Elias's discussion of issues arising from  
his experiences working on ODF metadata. I have to say that the  
little he wrote thus far is *very* familiar to me.

On Oct 14, 2007, at 8:00 PM, Elias Torres wrote:

> Mark Birbeck wrote:
[snip]
>> It's especailly confusing for authors when this 'inpiration' seems to
>> involve copying some RDFa attributes, but changing the names of
>> others. For example, @about is used, but @datatype has been  
>> renamed to
>> @data-type!
[snip]
>  The ODF Metadata group was so much more welcoming to our  
> perspective as opposed to other non-SW bred groups and us arguing  
> about 'dash' felt to me disrespectful, if not rude.
[snip]

Presumably, as RDFa is not finalized, it could align :)

However, this gets me to the real reason for replying: I'm wondering  
if RDFa folks would consider some authoring convenience syntax for  
typed literals. datatype="xsd:Bleach" is wretched for authoring no  
matter what the syntax. And silly too (the xsd is esp. annoying  
since, really, it's a fixed set of names...no namespaces needed).

One could have contentDate, or just date, integer, etc. So the  
following spec-example:

<span about="http://example.org/foo"
       property="ex:bar" content="10" datatype="xsd:integer">ten</span>

could be written as:

<span about="http://example.org/foo"
       property="ex:bar" integer="10">ten</span>

Or perhaps some content syntax:

<span about="http://example.org/foo"
       property="ex:bar" content="10i">ten</span>

Or, best, is that one defaults to "aggressive" parsing, so that  
things which can be parsed as more specific types than strings are  
so, and if you want to force a string, you have to put in an "s".

After all, strings which spell numbers or dates generally are *meant*  
as numbers or dates. And it's generally easy enough to get back to  
the lexical form, or simply to preserve it.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Sunday, 14 October 2007 22:35:12 UTC