Re: RDF-ISSUE-177: XMLLiteral and HTML [RDF Concepts]

Proposed answer:

[[
The purpose of both datatypes is to enable text with markup in HTML graphs. The XMLLiteral datatype was added to the original 2004 spec due to i18n requirements (e.g., bidirectional text, mixed-language text, and Ruby markup). This datatype is now widely deployed for a number of use cases, and removing it is realistically no longer possible.

Since XHTML has not seen the adoption that was expected back in the days of the previous WG, the HTML datatype has now been added as a more author-friendly alternative that addresses the same requirements.

The only RDF-WG specification that requires an XML parser for a conforming implementation is RDF/XML. There are no conformance criteria on any of the other documents that require an XML parser or HTML parser.

Implementing, for example, graph equivalence over these datatypes would require such a parser, but no entailment regime requires that these datatypes be recognised. Simpler put, the datatypes are optional. Implementations may elect to not support them, which means they simply treat these datatypes like any other unrecognised datatype: as strings that carry a marker for a certain syntax.

Implementing XMLLiteral in RDF 1.1 is considerably easier than before because the requirement for XML canonicalisation has been removed.

The most natural way to associate HTML or XML resources with an RDF graph is perhaps not what you propose, but something more like this:

  <example.com/mydocument.xml> dc:format "text/xml".

This has been possible since RDF 2004.
]]

Best,
Richard





On 8 Dec 2013, at 18:50, RDF Working Group Issue Tracker <sysbot+tracker@w3.org> wrote:

> RDF-ISSUE-177: XMLLiteral and HTML [RDF Concepts]
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/177
> 
> Raised by: Andy Seaborne
> On product: RDF Concepts
> 
> Recorded : http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-comments/2013Dec/0005.html
> 
> 
>

Received on Monday, 9 December 2013 19:25:14 UTC