Re: proposals for Lists and Seq (ISSUE-77)

On Thu, 2011-10-20 at 14:58 +0200, Dan Brickley wrote:
> On 20 October 2011 14:47, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2011-10-20 at 13:21 +0200, Dan Brickley wrote:
> >> On 20 October 2011 13:13, Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com> wrote:
> >> > I wouldn't be comfortable with marking Seq as "archaic" or similar unless there's a viable alternative, and I don't think List counts.
> >>
> >> Me neither.  Nor "quaint", "twee", "retro" or "regrettable". It's just
> >> what it is, with no great mystery or confusion.
> >
> > Actually, there's a great deal of confusion.  Please do explain -- in
> > one sentence for newbies -- why we have both Seq and List, and with Seq
> > better supported in RDF/XML and List better supported in Turtle, and how
> > someone should decide which to use.
> 
> Sure - good idea.
> 
> "The first RDF/XML specifications used a class rdf:Seq with numbered
> relationships to describe ordered lists; however when the later OWL WG
> were arm-twisted by W3C staff into using RDF as the syntax to define
> their language, they persuaded the RDF Core group (and others, e.g.
> N3/Turtle) to adopt a new list mechanism that used a linked list style
> that made it easier to tell when a list description was incomplete, at
> the cost of extra triples."

Nice :-) but you didn't answer the second-half of the question.

Also, why didn't you (the 2001-2004 RDF Core WG) just add an end-marker,
if that was the objective?     I missed that particular debate.

> > (To put it differently, I think it's quite harmful to the RDF to not deprecate Seq.)
> 
> I guess you're not paying by the triple for storage?

I should hope that no one stores well-formed lists as triples.  

Can you think of any way we could merge Seq and List?   Have well-formed
sequences and well-formed lists both mappable to native lists?   That
would work fine, except for round-tripping....

   -- Sandro

> cheers,
> 
> Dan
>

Received on Thursday, 20 October 2011 13:39:43 UTC