- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 15:29:42 -0700
- To: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- Cc: "Williams, Stuart" <skw@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, www-tag@w3.org
Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> A. to prohibit an RDF parser from taking such embedded RDF as being
> asserted by the document, without further information,
> N. Allow RDF parsers to "see through" any foreign XML as though it were
> transparent, and parse what is inside. This makes it impossible to define
> new XML tags to extend RDF into a more powerful language with any form of
> quotation, or "or" or "not" for example.
I agree that it's a good idea to provide a general-purpose mechansm to
allow XML instances to signal that they believe the RDF assertions they
contain, I don't understand at all why failure to do so makes it
impossible to define new XML tags.
> I think the RDF core group has to address the mixing of RDF with other
> languages. Every language spec should address namespace mixing. We as a
> community have been rather lax about it, partly from lack of experience of
> how we want to do it.
Hmm, this is a tricky one, I've been kicking it around my head and it's
not trivial at all. Do you want to just signal that *all* RDF in an
instance is to be believed, or do you want to individually bless chunks
of RDF that may be found here or there? For RDDL, you'd probably like
to say globally "Please believe any & all embedded RDF", but one can
imagine scenarios where you'd like to bless a particular package of
assertions.
Also, do you want to require that such blessing be attached to the
instance's root element? Also not obvious.
Anyhow, a strawman, suppose you define some new markup in the RDF namespace.
rdf:blessAll="true" <== believe all RDF contained herein
rdf:bless="foo" <== believe the embedded <rdf:rdf> element
with ID "foo"
rdf:blessings="bar" <== "bar" is the ID of an <rdf:blessings>
element which has an arbitrary number of
<rdf:bless id="foo"/> children indicating
other <rdf:rdf> elements to believe
-Tim
Received on Friday, 20 September 2002 18:29:47 UTC