- From: Markus Lanthaler <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net>
- Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:04:23 +0100
- To: <public-rdf-wg@w3.org>
Sorry for the late reply. I have been (and unfortunately am still) very busy. On Wednesday, November 07, 2012 2:19 PM, Ivan Herman wrote: > On Nov 7, 2012, at 05:54 , Richard Cyganiak wrote: > > > On 6 Nov 2012, at 22:38, Markus Lanthaler wrote: > >> Was it considered that also literals with datatypes other > >> than rdf:langString can be language-tagged? I'm specifically > thinking of > >> rdf:html for example.. > > > > Language tags don't make sense for the vast majority of datatypes. > Asking existing implementations to change in order to be able to store > language tags for integers and dates is a non-starter. > > > > This leaves the option of adding language tags to only a limited set > of datatypes, like rdf:HTML. The objection there is that this would add > *more* exceptions to the design of RDF literals (where our goal was to > make the handling of literals more uniform), and also rdf:HTML doesn't > need it because it already has a mechanism for language annotation > (<span lang="xx">). I see, but I still don't understand why that single exception exists then!? For historic reasons? To avoid blank nodes? > I would be, actually, a little bit stronger than Richard on this one. I > think it would be wrong to add a language tag to HTML (or to XML, for > that matter): having two different tools (the XML/HTML provided tools > as well as an RDF provided tool) would lead to confusion. Eg, when > comparing two HTML literals (which is based on a DOM function), one > where the language tag is set by RDF and the other where the language > tag is set via the HTML attribute, would two such HTML literals be > equal? (Provided the rest of the DOM is identical.) Yes, it's true that rdf:HTML has a mechanisms for language annotation. The problem is that if you want to filter such values based on language you have to parse each value which is a quite costly operation. There are certainly a lot of other data types that could profit from language tags, just think of Markdown, Textile, all the Wiki syntaxes, etc. yet there's no way language-tag them. That's exactly what triggered my question. Thanks, Markus -- Markus Lanthaler @markuslanthaler
Received on Wednesday, 14 November 2012 15:05:08 UTC