- From: Pierre-Antoine Champin <pierre-antoine@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 24 May 2022 19:00:06 +0200
- To: public-dxwg-wg@w3.org
- Message-ID: <27d75b51-3bcb-7635-f5bf-b1bc32f1a5d9@w3.org>
Hi all, this message is long overdue, sorry for the delay. I was supposed to explain why the upcoming RDF-star working group (1) would be interested in profile-based content negociation. RDF-star extends various concrete syntaxes of RDF, for example Turtle. Old Turtle files are still valid (and have the same meaning) in the new version, but some new constructs are invalid in the old syntax, and would therefore break old parsers. The defensive approach would be to define a new media-type for the new version of Turtle. Therefore, old consumers would not even try to parse new data). The problem is that up-to-date producers would probably expose the new media-type, even if they don't use (or rarely use) the new features. The optimistic approach is to update the media-type, and expect all consumers to eventually upgrade -- counting the fact that, in the meantime, they will only rarely be exposed to new features. And when they do, they need to deal with the error anyway. An intermediary approach is to update the media-type *with a notion of profile*. A provider could therefore expose content as text/turtle?profile=new or text/turtle?profile=old. To start with, this is the same as the optimistic approach: old consumers will ignore the profile, and might accidentally be exposed to new content. However, they could (relatively) easily be made "profile-aware", without requiring to upgrade them to support the new features (they would then explicitly require ?profile=old). Does it make sense? pa (1) RDF-star is currently a community group report, but a working group charter is in the work
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Received on Tuesday, 24 May 2022 17:00:11 UTC