RDF Concepts document Jan 23, lang comments

To the editors of the RDF Concepts document Jan 23 edition:
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/

I have 3 comments- These are individual comments, the W3C I18n Core group will
followup with you on their comments at next week's plenary meeting. I
apologize my comments come after your deadline.

1) The requirement for lang identifiers to be lowercase seems needless (small
cpu savings) and dangerous.

If different specs assert different rules for lang identifier casing, we may
one day run into a conflict, if these are enforced.

Individual specs should not make arbitrary policy.

The particular rule of all lower case is in conflict with other
recommendations and standards- RFC 3066 and ISO 3166 recommends (but does not
require) the country code be uppercase. 
The casing rules made by ISO's TC 37/SC 2 committee were defined a long time
ago and so are ingrained and prevalent in software.
It is therefore likely that other technologies and applications that want to
leverage RDF will already have tags in another casing form. For ease of
interoperability, the tag should ideally be case-insensitive. If they must be
case-sensitive, they should at least follow convention.

I am told that some applications may follow the convention of lower language
and upper country codes, so that if they are used individually, (perhaps when
parsed and taken apart) they can be distinguished.

I would urge you to make the lang identifier case-insensitive.


2) With respect to the rules for comparing literals:
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-Literal-Equality

For reasons of standardization and ease of use, there should exist a higher
level matching rule that allows one to search for (lang="en", str) and to get
matches to more detailed tags (lang="en-gb", str). 
This higher level rule should be defined to
insure a standard practice. I assume this is, or will be, defined somewhere
else in RDF. Presumably this rule will also provide for inclusion of strings
with no attribute as well, so I can search for a string and find all matches
with relevant sets of lang attributes.

To repeat the earlier point, the comparison rule should also be made case
insensitive for language identifiers.


3) "RDF URI References" are defined and are essentially IRI. It would be
better if the spec could simply cite the upcoming IRI spec, but I see RDF is
waiting on
the TAG to decide if they can do that yet. Hopefully that will be decided in
time for RDF to cite the spec before the Concept doc is final. This would
insure consistency of definitions.

tex

 
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com
Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
                         
XenCraft		            http://www.XenCraft.com
Making e-Business Work Around the World
-------------------------------------------------------------

Received on Friday, 28 February 2003 14:51:10 UTC