Re: reagle-01, reagle-02 issues

Er, Jeremy, which requirements does Pat's suggestion not meet?

#g
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At 11:52 PM 2/28/03 +0000, Jeremy Carroll wrote:


>>I took this comment as a rhetorical question meaning, "why bother even 
>>getting into canonicalization if you have implementation variance?" and 
>>hence suggesting a fourth option, which you did not consider:
>>D. Ignore XML canonicalization and treat XML literals as strings, ie the 
>>L2V mapping is the identity.
>>Then the entire rdf:XMLliteral datatype machinery is just an elaborate 
>>way of encoding the old 'XML bit', which I thought was the original 
>>intent in any case. Introducing XML canonicalization seems to have been 
>>one those neat ideas that got slipped in without too much discussion and 
>>has turned out to be a tar-pit. I am particularly concerned that this 
>>ugly mess is now centrally included in the very core of RDF. I would hope 
>>that many 'cheap and cheerful' RDF engines wouldn't even want to know 
>>about XML, still less about XML canonicalization.
>
>This really does not meet the requirements ...
>
>XML parsers really really have variability, when building RDF/XML parsers 
>we have to work out how to deal with that.
>
>So the simple webont examples where they want a single well-defined 
>denotation of some literal constructed with an rdf:parseType="Literal" 
>cannot be addressed simply by saying "use the original string".
>
>In some real contexts there isn't a string to use (e.g. parsing a DOM tree).
>
>We could have put all the work in the parser, and then the semantics could 
>just use the string - that may be your preference, but it's too late now.
>In practice I would expect a webont impl to work that way. However, I also 
>believe in practice that there will be cheaper parsers for low footprint 
>environments which don't do this.
>
>Jeremy

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Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>
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