Re: Turtle, Qurtle, Super-Turtle, N-Triple, N-Quads, Trig - BC and Scope

On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 1:55 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Okay, I'm lost, as to what's what and what is in scope, out of scope,
> possible and not.
>
> Is B.C. for turtle (data and consumers) to be maintained?
>

I was about to ask for clarification on this same issue.  The only mention
of backwards compatibility in the charter is with respect to graphs and
entailments: any existing RDF graph/entailment must be a valid
graph/entailment under the new specs.

Applied to Turtle, backwards compatibility would mean that any existing
Turtle document is still a valid Turtle document under the new specs.  I
think that is important to maintain.  Under this definition, the proposed
syntactic extensions to Turtle are backward compatible but TRiG is not
(because triples are not allowed to appear outside a graph block).

The reverse of that is forward compatibility -- if a deployment supports
Turtle v1 then will it also support Turtle v2?  In general I don't think
it's important to maintain forward compatibility between versions, but I
would assert that what we should be doing is standardizing version 1 of
Turtle before we start working on version 2, or even 1.x.

If we throw a bunch of new features into the existing Turtle submission and
call the result "Turtle 1.0" then I suspect we'll be breaking a lot of
existing deployments.

-Alex