- From: a <a@trwnh.com>
- Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:18:31 -0600
- To: public-rdf-star-wg@w3.org
Consider the following Turtle graph:
```ttl
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix vcard: <http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#> .
@base <https://trwnh.com/about/>.
<me>
a
foaf:Person,
vcard:Individual
;
..
```
A common idiom in programming languages is to allow trailing
characters in whatever is effectively or essentially a list. Turtle
itself as a concrete syntax of RDF supports the concept of "predicate
lists" (using semicolons, as defined in Section 2.2) and "object
lists" (using commas, as defined in Section 2.3).
However, a major annoyance is that while other languages generally
apply this idiom consistently (most commonly in what is known as
"trailing commas" or "trailing semicolons" being allowed), Turtle
seems to only apply this to semicolon-based "predicate lists" but NOT
to comma-based "object lists".
The above graph seems to pass validation even with the "extraneous"
semicolon in there, but immediately *fails* validation if you add just
one comma:
```ttl
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix vcard: <http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#> .
@base <https://trwnh.com/about/>.
<me>
a
foaf:Person,
vcard:Individual,
;
..
```
Can we get some consistency here?
---
Also published at: https://github.com/w3c/rdf-turtle/issues/124
Received on Wednesday, 11 February 2026 00:20:07 UTC