Re: Put <> around URIs. Re: draft CURIE draft feedback

Hi Tim,

I do like this, and looked at it myself a while ago. As you say, it
has the advantage of consistency, and it also means that the data type
of an attribute is set by its syntax, not by a schema driving the
document, which in my view has a lot of useful implications for
language design.

However, the first problem is that XML doesn't allow this.

Second, I had plenty of alternatives to the CURIE syntax, but given
how much trouble we've had getting people to take CURIEs seriously
(and to even accept that there is a problem to be solved), when all
we've done is a QName-lookalike, we took the view that getting other
techniques to fly would be really unlikely.

CURIEs are already "clearly a superior solution" when compared to
QNames; that doesn't mean they couldn't be improved further, but I
feel that the big leap is to get acceptance that there is a problem to
solve, and at the moment I feel like we're still in mid-air.

Regards,

Mark

On 14/04/2008, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:
>
> This is a comment I made earlier in a TAG context but thought I would repeat
> here.
> It seems silly to distinguish curies from URIs in a way which makes the
> short form longer.
> Why not make the short curie the default, and allow a longer syntax for the
> case in which someone wants to put a full URI?
>
> Thus not
>
>        <a zref="[book:ch1]">
>        <a
> zref="http://books.example.com/20078-3-789/book#ch1">
>
> but
>
>        <a zref="book:ch1">
>        <a
> zref="<http://books.example.com/20078-3-789/book#ch1>">
> or
>        <a
> zref="[http://books.example.com/20078-3-789/book#ch1]">
>
> This not only minimizes the number of characters in abbreviated case rather
> than the longhand case, it also uses a convention common elsewhere in N3 and
> SPARQL.  Clearly a superior solution, better for the documents and better
> for learning.
>
> Tim
>
>
>


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Received on Monday, 14 April 2008 21:00:34 UTC