- From: Andy Seaborne <andy@apache.org>
- Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 10:56:58 +0100
- To: public-rdf-star-wg@w3.org
On 12/05/2026 18:46, Gregory Williams wrote:
> On May 12, 2026, at 9:02 AM, Pierre-Antoine Champin <pierre-antoine@w3.org> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks to you both.
>> I was suspecting that this "discovery" of mine was actually old news for others :)
>>
>> +1 to what Andy wrote and to "fix" SPARQL 1.2.
>
> Agreed with what Andy and Thomas have said. I think such a change would be good for SPARQL, and that the original SPARQL escaping mechanism is problematic. However, I was under the impression that this would be too big a change to fit under the 1.2 charter, as it would be a breaking change to the syntax (both changing semantics of some queries, and making other formerly-acceptable queries invalid). I’d love to see this fixed, but think it probably needs to wait.
>
> I agree with the suggestion to add a "note in the SPARQL spec pointing out that pitfall”.
>
> .greg
>
>
SPARQL 1.1 is over 10 years ago. AIUI A "maintenance and new features"
mode for a working group isn't any more permissive for such a change.
As it has security implications so I hope it is in-scope for the WG
similar to an errata.
We could make the change and add text:
* Version 1.0 and 1.1 of SPARQL accepted numeric escape sequences
anywhere in the SPARQL request string.
* Implementations MAY accept such input, being aware of the issues this has.
* Systems MUST (or SHOULD?) produce text that only uses numeric escape
sequences in URIs and literal lexical forms.
Andy
Received on Wednesday, 13 May 2026 09:57:06 UTC