Literals and turning off datatype/language

Hello all!

The telecon for this Thursday (June 14th) aims to make official the
resolution to ISSUE-25 - Default Datatype for Literals. This is not an
attempt to re-raise the long-running debate. I do however have two
concerns I'd like to voice before the issue is resolved. (I must admit
I wasn't sure that a consensus had been reached..) Hopefully this is
already as things are intended to work.


My concerns are:

1) It should be possible to "turn off" datatyping, regardless of
whether rdf:XMLLiteral is the default or not. *Requiring* the author
to resort to @content could IMO discourage adoption of RDFa in
some/many cases. The reasons are:

    - A datatyped literal has no language information.
    - Given the same string values, a datatyped literal is not the
same as a plain literal.

Turning off datatyping should be done with an empty @datatype. Thus:

    <html ... xml:lang="en">
        <head>
            <title property="dc:title" datatype="">The Story Of Language</title>

should yield:

    <> dc:title "The Story Of Language"@en .


2) It should be possible to "turn off" language scope. The reason is:

    - Given the same string values, a literal with language is not the
same as a plain literal.

Turning off language scope should be done with an empty @xml:lang.
Thus (combined with turning off datatype):

    <p property="foaf:name" datatype="" xml:lang="">Some Body</p>

should yield:

    <> foaf:name "Some Body" .


That is all. As said, this may already be the default behaviour,
either implicitly or because I have failed to see it in the
specification (this *is* how xml:lang is supposed to work as described
at <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-lang-tag>). If not, I hope that
this can be agreed upon and possibly added explicitly to avoid
misunderstandings.


Best regards,
Niklas Lindström

Received on Thursday, 14 June 2007 01:46:17 UTC