Re: ISSUE-77: Should we mark rdf:Seq as archaic (cf ISSUE-24)

On Oct 15, 2011, at 05:40 , Sandro Hawke wrote:

> On Fri, 2011-10-14 at 14:05 +0200, Ivan Herman wrote:
>> On Oct 14, 2011, at 13:15 , Dan Brickley wrote:
>> 
>>> On 14 October 2011 11:56, Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com> wrote:
>>>> Not only that, it's actually useful.
>>>> 
>>>> There's only two (common) syntactic ways of expressing sequences/arrays/vectors, rdf:Seq and RDF Collections.
>>>> 
>>>> Both are pretty cumbersome, ugly, and arguably "broken" from some perspective, but as we don't have a valid replacement I don't think we should remove either one at the moment.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Yup, sorry I forgot XMP briefly; but yes that + RSS1 are significant,
>>> even if "old fashioned". XMP in particular is very hard to update
>>> because the files are all out there in the wild. I'm not sure we gain
>>> much by making some of our biggest and earliest backers look retro.
>>> 
>>> Doing ordering in a binary relationship structure like RDF, especially
>>> with all the open-worldism and data mixing, is always going to be a
>>> challenge. We'd do better issueing friendly guidelines and examples
>>> and tutorials, than issuing grand proclamations about how people's
>>> REC-following data is broken / obsolete.
>> 
>> +1
> 
> I politely disagree.    I think Turtle makes RDF Collections seem quite
> nice, and hopefully that will quickly set the tone (perhaps with a
> little help from us) for APIs and SPARQL 1.2 (?) having nice list
> handling functions that are as efficient as native (non-destructive)
> list handling functions. (I hope some APIs do this already.)

Point taken. (Actually, at last in my view, RDFa 1.1 also adopted an additional feature whereby it is easy and natural to create lists.) But it is a bit of a problem that SPARQL 1.1 still does not cover list handling fully:-(


> 
> Could that be done for Seq as well?  I don't think so, since there's no
> closing of the list.  So, we end up with one pretty-decent list
> mechanism, and one less-good one.   I think the only fair thing, in that
> situation, is to tell people that's what we've got.   And if you tell
> people they could use A or B, and A is better than B, that amounts to
> marking B as an Archaism.

Ok. I guess my problem is more a matter of wording, of public image. But if I try to put myself into the shoes of an Adobe representative who sells XMP to the world, I do not think I would like to announce a functionality that is labelled as 'archaic' by an international standard. That would not look very well, would it? Ie, it may be a matter of choosing another expression (do not ask me which one, my English is too poor for that...).

Ivan




> 
>   -- Sandro
> 
> 
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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