Re: quick ping - ISSUE-104

On Aug 30, 2008, at 1:13 PM, Shane McCarron wrote:

> First, I have to apologize.  I thought I had responded on this  
> issue. What I did was push the issue into the CURIE spec space  
> because there was a similar comment there.  I then resolved the  
> comment in the context of that spec and did not close the loop with  
> you.  This is what happens when I rely upon a personal task  
> management system, then don't put all my tasks into it.  Pathetic.
>
> Second, you are correct in asserting that there should be no  
> conflict between the CURIE spec and the RDFa spec's use of CURIEs.   
> We have been very careful to develop these in lockstep.  To respond  
> to your specific concern:
>
> Instead of putting the definition in Appendix B, we put it in  
> section 7. CURIE Syntax Definition.[1]  The specification reads:
>
> "Note that while the /lexical space/ of a CURIE is as defined in  
> curie <http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/#P_curie> above, the /value  
> space/ is the set of IRIs."

OK, I had found the working draft, which says URI, and was not looking  
at the editor's draft. Sorry.

Do you mean for the value space of CURIE to be different from the  
value space of xsd:anyURI, as this implies? Or do you mean for them to  
be the same?

> This is exactly the same as the draft CURIE specification[2], and is  
> in the same place to help ensure that the definitions are  
> consistent.  At the present time, we believe there are no conflicts  
> between these two specifications with regard to the definition of  
> CURIEs and their use.  I hope that this resolves your comment in  
> issue 104 to your satisfaction.
>
> To address the underlying question you seem to be posing...  a CURIE  
> is a syntactic short-hand for an IRI.  So the value space for the  
> two datatypes you reference, CURIE and URIorSafeCURIE, are exactly  
> the same.  The set of IRIs.

This may be true, but as far as I can tell the CURIE draft does not  
say this - and we're not talking about what's true, we're talking  
about what the document should say. URIorSafeCURIE and CURIE are  
completely different syntactic beasts, so if their value spaces happen  
to be the same, the document needs to say this somewhere; there's no  
way anyone could know this. You can't just leave it to people to draw  
conclusions.

If the value spaces of URIorSafeCURIE and xsd:anyURI are different,  
that would imply that any language extension that expanded an  
attribute value type from anyURI to URIorSafeCURIE would be in big  
trouble, because it would result in an incompatible change in the  
lexical to value space mapping. I'm no expert at this stuff but I was  
under impression that the RDFa extension of XHTML was one of these  
extensions.

If the value spaces are to be the same for the three types, with  
compatible mappings (i.e. the URIosSafeCURIE lexical-to-value mapping  
an extension of the anyURI lexical-to-value mapping and CURIEs mapped  
in the same way for both CURIE and URIorSafeCURIE), your documents  
have to come out and say so, since otherwise it will be an awful mess  
for anyone coming along later trying to figure it out. You can't just  
say "IRI" and expect anyone to know what you mean - are these subsets  
of the string type, or abstract types, or what? How is the lexical  
form mapped to the value? I don't know what the value space of anyURI  
is - my cynical self tells me it might not be URIs - but I think you  
owe it to the rest of us to find out what it is, cite the applicable  
standards (RFC whatever and/or XML Schema whatever), and take a stand  
on whether there are two value spaces or one.

I also still think you need to be much more explicit in Appendix A of  
the CURIE draft, which is where I would expect the general reader to  
go to look for this information. The informative XML Schema  
definitions may be better than nothing (I'm not sure, if they're just  
informative) but do not explain what's going on in any humanly useful  
way, and while they may imply things about the value spaces and  
mappings (do they? I don't know), they don't really explain where  
these regular expressions come from (RFCs?) or what they mean, and as  
far as I can tell they don't say anything about the mappings.

So no, the issue is not resolved to my satisfaction.

Jonathan

Received on Saturday, 30 August 2008 19:41:14 UTC