Re: Why is there no RDFa syntax working draft?

Ben Adida wrote:
> 
> Hi Dave,
> 
>> Can you tell me why there is no working draft of the RDFa syntax?
> 
> Only because we're super swamped and have been working on solving issues
> over the last few months. As Michael, Shane, and Mark have mentioned,
> WDs are very much on the way, and comments have been taken from the WG
> and the public for > 1 year.

Understandable, ... but this is the same for all WGs. And we expect the 
others to publish their thinking in /TR/ regardless, so SemWeb groups 
have to be held to the same standard. It's a tough one though (and we 
failed to keep it in RDFCore a few times).

> We also have a number of implementations and a growing set of test cases
> to make the WD complete.
> 
>> If there was a WD I'd then have somewhere to complain about:
>> 1) the way plain literal, typed literals and XML Literals are used.
>>    A mess.  There is no need for XML literals when simple will do.
> 
> There is actually a very clear need for XML literals in a number of
> cases, but as you correctly point out there is a need to make it easy to
> have plain literals, too. The latest resolution, which will be reflected
> in upcoming drafts of the Primer and Syntax, is that:
> 
> <span property="dc:title">Foo</span>
> 
> yields a plain literal, while
> 
> <span property="dc:title">E=mc<sup>2</sup></span>
> 
> yields an XMLLiteral.

Please publish the draft so I can criticise it!

I'm uncomfortable with literal value inspection as the notation for 
indicating type. It makes round-tripping hard. I could have a load of 
data, all of which in my source database used XMLLiteral as a type, even 
if only some of the values (currently) had markup in them. I can 
reasonably compose SPARQL queries that pull out these as XMLLiterals. If 
I push that data out into RDFa, my literals will sometimes end up 
XMLLiteral, and sometimes plain Literal, in the process perhaps 
acquiring language tags from the HTML context. When parsed back into a 
database, I'm left with significantly mangled data.


> Your request for documents is perfectly legitimate, and we're working
> hard on that. Watch the list over the next few weeks, and, if you have
> time, do send us comments!

I look forward to the drafts :)

cheers

Dan

> -Ben
>

Received on Tuesday, 4 September 2007 15:54:02 UTC