Re: Dropping the redundant colon in N3

> i reread the primer quickly and I don't see anything about "keywords"

Try: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3
For example, you could have :x has :y of :z, which if you got rid of the
colons would be x has y of z. Actually, I don't like that, because what if
you had ":hasAuthor", then it doesn't make grammatical sense (e.g. "has
hasAuthor of", or even worse "is :hasAuthorOf of"); but TimBL said that is
optional (I suppose to make it a bit more legible to humans). I'd take 'em
out if it were up to me, and let the properties do the talking :-)

> But your right, if the intent is to allow any key words whatsoever
> and just have the parser ignore them, and if that is more important
> than worrying about the messy redundancy, then the colon would
> be necessary.

I think the colon is there due to the fact that it fits in neater with the
namespace spec. I wouldn't make much sense to have:-

     @prefix <URI>

Because you would be expecting something to bind. Maybe if the ns alias
(prefix) to bind were in quotes, ala.:-

     @prefix "myprefix:" <URI>

then you could have

     @prefix "" <URI>

But it gets a bit messy. I don't know really, I think it's alright the way
it is. "Too many cooks spoil the broth", and all that :-)

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://infomesh.net/2001/01/n3terms/#> .
[ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] has :homepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .

Received on Saturday, 20 January 2001 16:43:51 UTC