RE: Made rdf:HTML/XMLLiteral non-normative

On Monday, December 16, 2013 7:56 PM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
[...]
> 
> In my eyes, the correct thing to do is this:
> 
> 1. Make the datatypes normative again
> 2. Define the value space and L2V mapping as "implementation-defined"
> 3. Add informative material that describes the DOM4-based
> implementations of these two concepts, and state that they are
> informative simply because the DOM4 spec is still subject to change at
> time of writing.
> 
> The result is that an implementation technically conforms to the spec
> regardless of how it implements the value space of these datatypes.

And what would we gain by that?

IMHO normative statements, especially MUSTs, have to be used sparingly and
only to specify things that are necessary for interoperability. I've
problems seeing how that applies to this case here. Interoperability is
certainly not improved if the behavior is "implementation-defined".

Given that we can't improve interoperability at this point in time, what is
it that we are trying to achieve? I think all we want is an IRI to label
literals as HTML or XML snippets so that applications won't lose that
information. It's simply a marker. Whether that marker is normative or not
doesn't change anything IMO, especially considering the prominence they'll
get by just being in the "rdf" namespace.


> That's the best we can do. It doesn't seem like a big deal, because
> actually implementing equivalence checking on these literals seems to
> have little benefit anyways.

The simplest thing to do then would be to make the value space equal to the
lexical space, i.e., a string as I've proposed in the past. Unfortunately,
doing that at this stage would be a significant change and require as to go
back to LC I believe.

So, to move forward, my proposal would simply be


PROPOSAL: Drop the "If the IRI ...#XMLLiteral/#HTML is recognized then it
refers to the datatype rdf:XMLLiteral/rdf:HTML" statements in section 5.4 of
RDF Concepts.


I checked Semantics and saw that their only mention is in

  "Two other datatypes rdf:XMLLiteral and rdf:HTML are defined in
   [RDF11-CONCEPTS]D interpretations MAY fail to recognize these
  datatypes."

Which could simply be dropped. They are also mentioned in the incomplete
"some rdfs-valid triples". It doesn't really matter whether they stay there
or not.


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Tuesday, 17 December 2013 14:23:07 UTC