Re: Turtle tests blank ID patches, and EARL report for Serd

On Mon, 2013-02-25 at 11:30 -0800, Gavin Carothers wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 10:13 PM, David Robillard <d@drobilla.net> wrote:
> 
> >
> > Issue: There are tests-ttl tests that do not match the current grammar
> > [2], e.g. turtle-syntax-prefix-02.ttl contains "PreFIX :
> > <http://example/>", but the grammar only allows PREFIX.
> 
> The grammar no longer specifies all of the case rules in Turtle,
> specifically Note #1 of the Grammar section (
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-turtle/index.html#sec-grammar-grammar
> ):
> 
>    1. Keywords in single quotes ('@base', '@prefix', 'a', 'true', 'false')
>    are case-sensitive. Keywords in double quotes ("BASE", "PREFIX") are
>    case-insensitive.
> 
> This is a editoral change from the LC document
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-turtle-20120710/#sec-grammar-grammar see
> change set https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/rev/d3e8ccd67c9c  and the thread
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-wg/2012Dec/0074.html

Ah, sorry, I missed this, though that's not surprising; this is pretty
weird.  To me this seems like a workaround for objections to the ugly
[Pp][Rr] etc. grammar, but moving the rule to a Note doesn't change the
fact that this is actually the grammar.

Sorry to beat this dead horse, but the fact that this note only applies
to these two rules is a symptom of those rules clearly not belonging in
the language.  Turtle is case sensitive.  I oppose adding this ugly,
redundant, and inconsistent kludge to the language in the strongest
possible terms.

Triple compatibility is a good thing, but the top level forms of the two
languages are completely different.  I do a lot of Turtle/RDF advocacy
to a crowd where RDF is not at all a given.  That is already an uphill
battle with Turtle as a nice pretty thing; making it some nasty mongrel
of disparate syntaxes isn't helping.

Directives in Turtle start with '@' and end with '.'.

If *implementations* want to implement this or other SPARQL forms,
great, they can do so.  They do not belong in Turtle, and writing them
should not be encouraged or considered standard.  This is breakage.
Somehow it's being done in the name of compatibility, but breakage is
what it is - ugly and redundant breakage at that.

Thanks,

-dr