- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 17:47:14 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- cc: <www-rdf-comments@w3.org>
Hi On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Brian McBride wrote: > At 16:28 22/10/2002 -0400, Dan Brickley wrote: > > [...] > > >According to M+S '99 REC (which has about='' examples) > > is that only elements in the rdf namespace? Ah no. there is an example in > another namespace. Another as well, that's a shame. It seems that the resource= and about= usage has taken off. I know of no apps that are using non-prefixed attributes to encode RDF properties (thankfully). The about= examples do seem to have been copied/followed though... > > >this is OK. > >According to RDF Core, it isn't. The new RDF syntax spec doesn't make > >clear why such documents are no longer considered RDF, only that they are > >not. Perhaps there is a case based on parser complexity, efficiency etc., > >but I've not yet seen it made strongly enough to justify the backwards > >compatibility hit. > > As I recall, a concern was about defining names not in the rdf namespace, e.g. > > <foo:bar about="..."> Yup. > We talked about deprecation but were advised against by DanC. I remember. Seemed so reasonable at the time. Seems the cleanest way out now, given that the '99 REC encourages a usage we don't like, and that having two ways of writing this forever seems excessive. > In practise > parsers will be tolerant of this input In practice, XML documents that are written 'about=' are not RDF/XML documents, and are assigned no semantics by the RDF MT. Parsers may transform these formally meaningless XML documents into similar RDF documents and hence graphs, but I don't really want to encourage this. If we think the XML inside XMP files isn't RDF, and is meaningless, we should clearly say so; if we think it is RDF, ditto. Formally outlawing it but giving the nod'n'wink to scrapers/extractors/convertors seems to be the worst of both worlds. > unless they are set to strict mode > and that seemed like a reasonable migration strategy. We could add a note > to they syntax doc suggesting that parser writers be aware. > > On the other hand, I personally agree that is a change to M&S and perhaps > we can find some other way to deal with it. I hope so (eg. see DanC's suggestion). I don't like re-opening issues but I realise I'd not until today really thought through the consequences of this particular (early) decision. cheers, Dan -- mailto:danbri@w3.org http://www.w3.org/People/DanBri/
Received on Tuesday, 22 October 2002 17:47:17 UTC