Re: Turtle implementation report for RDF::Trine

On 17/04/13 15:02, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> * Gregory Williams <greg@evilfunhouse.com> [2013-04-17 22:50+0900]
>> On Apr 17, 2013, at 10:16 PM, David Wood <david@3roundstones.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Dave,
>>
>> Thanks for the quick response.
>>
>> I took a look at the discussion around ISSUE-1, but didn't see
>> anything directly about the @prefix vs. PREFIX syntax difference.
>>
>> I understand you're not an editor, but could you comment on how you
>> think optimizing "for user time" interacts with my concern about
>> having two different rules about trailing dots? My concern is about
>> optimizing for both implementors and users, but since
>> implementations happen once but use of those implementations again
>> and again, I'm actually much more concerned with the potential
>> impact of these grammar rules on users in this case.
>
> I think everyone's gazing into their crystal balls and trying to
> figure out how to balance these competing constraints:
>
> simplicity -- primarily, don't confuse authors. secondarily, don't be
> cruel to developers.
>
> compatibility with SPARQL -- make it as easy as possible to copy
> stuff (triples and directives) between Turtle and SPARQL.
>
> backward compatibility -- there's a *lot* of Turtle out there.

+1 to compatibility

But also it depends how much to prioritize existing parsers.

> The user time question you raised is exemplified in the case where
> someone is copying prefixes from a SPARQL query. I would argue that
> ideally, we'd see one popular representation for prefix (and base)
> declarations and it would be compatible with SPARQL (fixing the '@'s
> and '.'s is frustrating for many users). The big question is how
> reallistic is it that we can migrate there from our current
> widely-deployed '@' directives and how can we balance short-term and
> long-term interests.

I'm not convinced there is a major need to align prefixes.  I see it
more as a historical artifact.   If the community, want it fine; there 
opinions expressed for and against.

But - an observation -

for those goals, one step would be to make '.' optional in the
@prefix/@base forms.

	Andy

>
>
>> thanks, .greg
>>
>>
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 15:13:43 UTC