Re: Alternate parseType Issues

Aaron Swartz wrote:
[...]
> 
> That's an interesting point of view, but if an RDF 1.0 parser is expected to
> process documents with new parseTypes,

I think that's my point.  Was RDF 1.0 specified with a viewpoint that an RDF
processor was NOT expected to process other parseTypes.  What we are
discovering is that parseType's are being defined by the community.

> then it should be able to have some
> knowledge of where to expect it. I think this is a simple change to
> production 6.32, making it:
> 
> [6.32] parseLiteral   ::= ' parseType="' Qname '"'

We could do that, but that is a solution.  At the moment I'm just trying
to figure out what the issue is.

[...]

> So something like:
> 
>     There is no specific data model representation for a parseType (i.e., it
>     adds no triples to the data model); the parseType of a literal is
>     considered by RDF to be a part of the literal. Literals with no
>     parseType are considered as if they were parseType="Literal".
> 
> would be just fine.

Ah.  I see what you mean.  This would seem to relate also to:

  http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-xmllang
  http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-xml-literal-namespaces
  http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-literal-is-xml-structure

Maybe we need a general issue about the processing of parseType Literal.

> Well, what I am really getting at is that like it or not, parseTypes are
> being used as an open extensibility mechanism, and this mechanism is clearly
> useful. There are many things (base64, new list structures, additional
> logical semantics, datatypes of literals, etc.) that people would like to
> add to RDF, and parseType provides a good place for them in a reasonably
> backwards-compatible manner. I think that as long as this ability is in the
> spec, people will continue to use it, and so we should document this
> feature.

So I think the core issue you are raising here then is opening up 
parseType as an extensibility mechanism.

I guess my question here is whether there is anything actually broken
with the current spec that needs fixing.  Or is this a this would be nice
to have feature?

Brian

Received on Tuesday, 12 June 2001 13:08:42 UTC