Re: Tag-less literals and literals with empty tags

It is obvious to regular English speakers, yes.  A bit harder to discern for
non-English readers to translate up.  Just seeing the "" double quotes, we
are saying "an empty string", true, but then we say "form" right after that.
 An there begins the slight problem.  If you want something even more
concise and easily translatable from my experiments (including Mandarin) :

The xml:lang="" empty string form indicates the absence of a language
identifier.

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>wrote:

> Thad,
>
> I don't understand.
>
> [[
> The xml:lang="" form indicates the absence of a language identifier.
> ]]
>
> To me, the obvious reading of this is that an xml:lang attribute with an
> empty string value indicates the absence of a language identifier.
>
> What is the alternative reading that makes this unclear/ambiguous?
>
> (CC Fabien Gandon, the editor of the RDF/XML spec)
>
> Best,
> Richard
>
>
>
> >
> > Technically, just the term "form" without more clues is slightly unclear.
>  You do not know if it's the xml:lang= structure or the xml:lang="" empty
> string structure.  And that's where the confusion stemmed from.  "form"
> alone is unclear.  Your expecting someone to see "" and know we are talking
> about the empty string structure.  An improvement would be to reword
> explicitly with this:
> >
> > The xml:lang="" form, where an empty string is provided in lang,
> represents the absence of a language identifier.
> >
> > --
> > -Thad
> > http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 8:26 AM, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl> wrote:
> > Hi Richard,
> >
> >
> >
> > On 26 Jul 2011, at 12:28, Antoine Isaac wrote:
> > I'm still slightly uncomfortable with your:
> >
> > Other specifications and implementations may explicitly treat an empty
> string as absence of a language tag, but that doesn't change anything.
> >
> > Well, we *can* clarify this in the set of documents that the RDF WG is
> currently editing.
> >
> > It changes something: it can make a reader puzzled, and may result in
> loosing time in discussions that are merely caused by what seems to be (but
> in fact is not) lack of synch between specs. It's an editorial issue,
> granted. But still it's an issue, no?
> > And perhaps the solution could be straightforward: just emphasizing that
> the reference is really the "RDF Concepts" doc, and that some
> syntax-specific handling of language tags in RDF/XML should not be read in a
> way that questions this reference.
> >
> > The RDF/XML spec says:
> >
> > [[
> > The xml:lang="" form indicates the absence of a language identifier.
> > ]]
> >
> > I'm not really sure how to state it much clearer than that.
> >
> >
> > Yes, this is really clear.
> >
> >
> >
> > I raised an issue against RDF/XML about referring to RDF Concepts more
> explicitly in the intro:
> > http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/72
> >
> >
> > Sounds good.
> >
> > Antoine
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > -Thad
> > http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry
>
>


-- 
-Thad
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry