Re: [Turtle CR Issue] whitespace before '.' and ';'

On 02/10/13 13:25, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> We have two issues going back to Feb with people requesting whitespace
> before '.' and ';', i.e.
>
>    <s> <p> <o> . # good
>    <s> <p> <o>. # bad
>    <s> <p> <o> ; <p2> <o2> . # good
>    <s> <p> <o>; <p2> <o2> . # bad
>
> We discussed the grammar at length but this never came up. Proposal:
> answer comments 1 and 2 with "The RDF Working Group believes that
> introducing a requirement for whitespace before '.' and ';' will break
> a considerable fraction of the deployed Turtle and introduce
> unfortunate incompatibilities with SPARQL and Notation3." Note that
> commentor 1 is responding to lookahead required when implementing a
> parser without a separate greedy lexer and commenter 2 is backing up 1
> with a usability argument.
>
> Comments: <http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/Turtle_Candidate_Recommendation_Comments#Issues>
> comment 1: http://www.w3.org/mid/1361141033.16176.30.camel@verne.drobilla.net
> comment 2: http://www.w3.org/mid/1361211939.4549.115.camel@dbooth-w530
>

Agreed - many traditional Turtle and existing data would break (inc 
Freebase)

SPARQL compatibility is weakened.  We had a trailing dot on prefix names 
there as well.

It is actually a very big change - we'd need to change the whitespace 
rules, as the grammar part does not mention WS; essentially adding WS 
into the rules part.

	Andy

Received on Wednesday, 2 October 2013 15:22:19 UTC