- From: Antoine Zimmermann <antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr>
- Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:15:42 +0200
- To: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
- CC: public-rdf-wg@w3.org
Ok, good points. You now have my vote in favour of your proposal. Le 28/09/2011 09:48, Richard Cyganiak a écrit : > Antoine, > > On 26 Sep 2011, at 14:22, Antoine Zimmermann wrote: >>> No programming language knows that "foo@en" is supposedly a string >>> tagged as English. >> >> Right but RDF and other specs can---and do---introduce types of their >> own (e.g., rdf:XMLLiteral, rdf:PlainLiteral, owl:decimal, owl:real for >> instance). The datatype mechanism of RDF is extensible so that we can do this kind of things. > > The nice things about extensibility points is that the misdesigned and bizarre extensions just get ignored. > > I consider i18n support an important part of RDF. I don't want to see it converted into a misdesigned and bizarre extension that subsequently will be ignored. > > (Aside: As an extension mechanism, datatypes in RDF are a miserable failure. Outside of the core RDF and OWL specs, *not a single* new datatype has been defined that has actually caught on and become popular.) > >> However, I'd like to know what you say about implementations that use Literal.getDatatype() or Literal.getDatatypeURI() to do some specific tasks for tagged literals? >> >> They'll have to change their tests from if(dt==null) {...} to if(dt.equals(RDF.LangString)) {...}. > > No. The check if(dt==null) doesn't test for language-tagged strings in RDF 2004. It tests for plain literals. The check for language-tagged strings in RDF 2004 is if(lang!=null) and that still works with the new proposal. > >> Can you justify that this is not significant, while code using getLexicalForm() is? > > In my proposal, many applications won't require any changes. > > Some will require changes. > > In the worst-case scenario, if no change is made, "foo"@en would be treated like "foo"^^rdf:langString would have been treated in RDF 2004 (with rdf:langString being an unknown datatype URI). That's still sort of reasonable. It's breakage, but not horrible breakage. > > In your proposal, the *default* case (not worst case) would be displaying your name as "Antoine@fr Zimmermann@fr". Every single string with a language tag, in every application, would be broken. That's horrible breakage. > > Best, > Richard -- Antoine Zimmermann ISCOD / LSTI - Institut Henri Fayol École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne 158 cours Fauriel 42023 Saint-Étienne Cedex 2 France Tél:+33(0)4 77 42 66 03 Fax:+33(0)4 77 42 66 66 http://zimmer.aprilfoolsreview.com/
Received on Wednesday, 28 September 2011 08:16:19 UTC