Re: Request for clarifications re XMLLiteral in RDFa (was: Re: XML Literals poll)

Hi Gregg,

On 24 Nov 2011, at 00:37, Gregg Kellogg wrote:
>> Namespace promotion isn't a feature of rdf:XMLLiterals – it's a feature of certain RDF syntaxes (RDF/XML for @parseType="literal", and RDFa). Changing this for RDFa is not something that the RDF WG can help with, I think.
> 
> Good point, it's RDFa that says the XMLLiteral should be in Exclusive Canonical representation, not the datatype.

Well, not quite – the rdf:XMLLiteral datatype definition *does* say that the lexical space is in XC14N representation. But it doesn't say anything about how a concrete syntax has to handle namespaces.

>> What you're saying is that rdf:XMLLiteral is being abused to indicate the presence of general HTML markup. This abuse indicates the existence of an important unmet need. The response should be a call for meeting that need, and not necessarily a call for changing rdf:XMLLiteral to legalize the abuse.
> 
> My takeaway is that the RDFWA WG might want to look more at the HTML Literal as being more appropriate for our purposes.

The RDF WG also has an open issue regarding the possibility of adding an HTML datatype:
http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/63

This is for the same reasons that we discussed here – the original main purpose for rdf:XMLLiteral was to enable the inclusion of small snippets of “rich text” in literals in RDF graphs. In 2011, this requirement would perhaps be better met by an HTML datatype (my personal opinion – not necessarily RDF WG consensus). On the other hand, the RDF WG may not be the best place to define such a datatype. We might need some coordination across WGs here.

Best,
Richard

Received on Thursday, 24 November 2011 14:33:55 UTC