Re: Turtle implementation report for RDF::Trine

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your comments.  Apologies for not responding earlier.  That was our oversight.  I will also ask the Turtle editors to respond to you.

Alignment with SPARQL syntax was literally the first issue raised for this working group.  Please see the issue and a small portion of the notes and email discussions around it here:
  http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/1

The working group did resolve to include this alignment and it was marked "at risk" pending comments from the community.  We will see whether others feel as strongly as you do during the remainder of the comment period.

*Personally* (and thus not as co-chair), I think it is much more important to optimize for user time than implementor time.  Although these changes make the grammar much less clean, they also remove the most common cause of invalid Turtle creation by hand and by code.  That is worth something substantial to many people.

Regards,
Dave
--
http://about.me/david_wood



On Apr 17, 2013, at 08:49, Gregory Williams <greg@evilfunhouse.com> wrote:

> On Mar 2, 2013, at 4:04 AM, Gregory Williams <greg@evilfunhouse.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'd like to take this opportunity to provide feedback on the inclusion of SPARQL BASE and PREFIX syntax in the new Turtle grammar. I think this is a mistake, adding complexity for both users and implementors. I'm sympathetic to the desire to align syntax for triples between Turtle and SPARQL, but don't believe the alignment is necessary or recommended for the top-level language syntax (as the need for backwards compatibility with pre-REC Turtle means that alignment requires two different syntaxes for the same declarations).
>> 
>> If the WG thinks that this alignment is absolutely necessary, I object to the needless complexity of having two different rules regarding trailing DOTs depending on the lexical form used. For example, as written the grammar requires a trailing DOT after "@base", but forbids it after "BASE". I can't think of a reason why having these different rules would be a benefit to anyone. One solution to this might be to allow an optional DOT after either form, but as I said, I think the best thing would be to keep just a single syntax for these declarations.
> 
> I don't think I ever received any reply about this comment/objection. Perhaps it was a mistake including it in the same email as an implementation report. I see that the CR lists it as "at risk," but was there any discussion on the mailing list about this issue?
> 
> thanks,
> .greg
> 
>