RE: Disimproved definition of literals in Concepts; close ISSUE-94?

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