Re: Encouraging canonical serializations of datatypes in RDF

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 11:31 AM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:

> How forcefully such canonicalization should be encouraged is a matter
> for debate.  I do not think it should be a "MUST".  "SHOULD" would be
> fine, as there are good reasons why someone may want to generate
> non-canonical literals.  But it may also be good enough to just put an
> editorial note in the spec saying that "RDF generators are encouraged to
> generate literals in a standard, canonical form that allows simple
> string comparison to test for equality and greater-than/less-than when
> possible".

Ignoring all the datetime stuff talked about in the rest of this
thread. We've already moved away from requiring more canonicalization
based on implementation experience. RDF Concepts 1.1 changes the
lexical space of XMLLiteral to be ANY self contained XML content
rather then requiring it to be exclusive canonical XML. [1]  In the
real word lots of implementations failed to implement the old
exclusive canonical XML. The new HTML data-type has no canonical form.
Requiring implementations to exchange canonical XML didn't work.

--Gavin

[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/#section-XMLLiteral

> --
> David Booth, Ph.D.
> http://dbooth.org/
>
> Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
> reflect those of his employer.
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2012 17:08:59 UTC