The xi namespace

Dan and GRDDL WG,

Harry asked me to accept an action to send a note to the W3C,
specifically Dan Connolly with potential follow up with Liam Quin.
I will leave it to Dan to decide if/when to notify Liam and/or others
at W3C about this suggestion. Frankly, it may be a bit of a process
burden to realize the following suggestion due to the fact that we
are stretching beyond our own mandate and charter into the territory
of others.

I pointed out in this week's GRDDL call that it would be possible
and potentially highly desirable, to relate a GRDDL transformation
with the XInclude namespace, thereby sidestepping the whole question
of how GRDDL transformations should behave in the face of an
XInclude in a document.

Of course, if XInclude processing occurs in the course of events that
leads to creation of an infoset, then the XInclude question is moot.
It is only in the case of a GRDDL-aware processor without recourse
to XInclude processing that my plan comes into effect.

My suggestion is that there should be transformation(s) against which
an instance of <xi:include .../> could be processed to achieve something
useful. My hope is that someone clever can write a simple bit of XSLT
that would transform the <xi:include .../> into a useful triple. I am not
proposing the content of such an XSLT transform or the expected triple.
I leave that as an exercise for the other members of the GRDDL WG,
with the observation that an XInclude can, in general, be replaced
with a corresponding XML entity declaration and use. We would need
a rule that gives this particular transformation privilege to run first,
ahead of any/all other transformations.

The bigger question is whether the GRDDL WG can ask the W3C, or
some appropriate part of the W3C, to add a GRDDL namespaceTransformation
assertion to the XInclude namespace document -- that being the REC, I assume.

Failing that, I would suggest that a tested snippet of XSLT be included in a
non-normative portion of the spec or the Primer with a caveat about the
potential for erroneous result graphs if XIncludes are not processed. The 
nature
of the warning might be something like:

	This Information Resource may or may not be a faithful representation
	of the original source document (href) because (##) XIncludes were
	not expanded before the transformation(s) were run. The result graph
	may or may not contain all of the useful triples that might have been
	gleaned from the source document if the XIncludes were expanded in place.

As part of our due diligence it might be wise to do a review of extant W3C 
specs
which might benefit from similar treatment to that proposed here for XInclude.

Regards,

Murray

Received on Saturday, 16 December 2006 17:37:03 UTC