Re: Dropping the redundant colon in N3

Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com> wrote:

>> Also I note that your <...> construct in N3 cannot be easily nested inside of
>> XML .. which i take as a real drag.
> So do I, but you can't simply remove it because http: would be interpreted
> as a namespace alias! There needs to be something there that says "this is
> a URI".

It's more than just the issue of namespace aliases -- it's the fundamental
fact that there's no way to pick out what a URI is. Here are some URIs
(inside quotes):

""
"../"
"http://www.yahoo.com/"
"bob"
"./foaf:wednesday"
"mid:huh@w3.org"

There's really no way to detect them with out some sort of special syntax.

One way that might work is something like:

    URI:http://www.yahoo.com

and ban URI as a namespace prefix in N3. You could also figure out some
other sort of delimiter for URIs that didn't conflict with XML.

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]