Re: ISSUE-137 (including XML includes)

On Sep 12, 2008, at 6:35 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 12:42 PM, Bijan Parsia  
> <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Just for clarity, what is the argument and what are the hinge points?
>
> That a solution to this issue should not work for only one
> serialization of RDF, i.e. it should be independent of the specific
> RDF serialization.

That's not an argument. That is a proposed requirement.

That requirement has been shown to be, in one sense, incoherent.  
There is *no* solution which is independent of the specific RDF  
serialization. If we define a bespoke solution, *all* serializations  
will have to be updated. So it's an impossible requirement (unless,  
for example, we want to take control of *all* the RDF serializations  
in the work, Trix, ntriples, turtle, TRIPLE, etc.). Thus, we don't  
need to meet it.

If we repair it a bit i.e., to something which is *able* to cross  
serializations, then, as I've already pointed out, XInclude does the  
job (since other serialization can easily make their own syntax for  
this feature). Thus, your requirement is met by the XInclude proposal.

Of course, there are strong considerations against a bespoke  
solution, including reuse of existing standards, not complicating our  
spec with a bespoke solution esp. at this late stage, etc. etc. I've  
not seen you address any of these yet, though, of course, there's  
little point unless you come up with a criticism. Presumably, if we  
have two solutions and one is one we make up and one is an existing  
standard explicitly designed for this problem, we should reuse the  
existing standard (esp. when, contrary to your speculation, it is  
widely implemented and deployed).

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Friday, 12 September 2008 19:45:01 UTC