RE: XML observation

>Sorry for my delay in answering over the weekend.
>And please don't remove the I18N IG mailing list address.

Sorry, my CC lists are autogenerated, something must have slipped.

>
>At 11:59 03/07/07 -0500, pat hayes wrote:
>
>>>>  - Whereas the XML conventions for real datatypes in many ways can be
>>>>     taken as just a notational convention for abstract concepts such as
>>>>     'integer' that RDF treats as abstract concepts, in the case of
>>>>     XML literals, we are dealing with marked-up text, and so there the
>>>>     abstraction we are dealing with is XML, not just the notation.
>>>>     (if RDF would want to create their own abstraction of marked-up
>>>>     text, that would be a different thing, but currently, it doesn't)
>>>
>>>Again, you seem to be presuming that if it is an XML literal, it
>>>is natural language content. That presumption unfounded.
>>
>>In fact, the very existence of RDF/XML illustrates this. Like it or 
>>not, RDF/XML is legal XML, so can itself be enclosed in an RDF XML 
>>literal; but one would not expect that RDF/XML to inherit any 
>>attributes of the outer RDF/XML.
>
>Yes, you can. But that's not the primary goal of XML literals, and
>that's not what they are usually used for. Let's not design things
>so that we can make a point, but so that they are most useful for
>what they are most used for.

Well, point taken, but we really have to design the semantics so that 
they are at least internally coherent for *all* uses, not just the 
currently popular ones. If RDF only gets used for things that it is 
usually used for right now then it will have been rather a failure.

Also, I would question whether XML literals have a single primary 
goal, other than to provide for XML content. Once (if?) RDF/XML 
becomes common, this use case may well become important.

>And by the way, coming back to one of the main points, plain literals
>do inherit language information from the context (if there is such
>information),

True; that functionality was explicitly requested by one of our user 
communities who needed it for deployed large systems. We supplied it 
as requested, but with some misgivings.

>  and there is always xml:lang="" if that's not desirable,
>and on the other hand, there is no guarantee that plain literals are
>natural text.

True. In fact, they could be XML text, right?

Pat

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Received on Tuesday, 8 July 2003 15:43:59 UTC