Re: Encouraging canonical serializations of datatypes in RDF

On Wed, 2012-08-01 at 10:08 -0700, Gavin Carothers wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.  That's why I'm talking about *encouraging* -- not requiring.
Again, even if it cannot be done 100% of the time, it can still be
helpful when it is done.


-- 
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 17:34:51 UTC