Re: Comment on RDFa 1.1 Core: Empty elements should not create literals

Empty values can be useful so I'd prefer to stick to the current behavior.

If the resource being described doesn't have a particular property, it
shouldn't be specified. That's different from saying a property has a
value of the empty string.

 Obviously, I'm not saying anything new here. Just hoping to retain
flexibility in the syntax and processing model.

 -Sebastian


On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com> wrote:
> I agree with this comment.  However, I would note that it will be a
> backward-incompatible change so we should go into it with eyes wide open.
>
> On 8/5/2010 5:53 AM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
>>
>> Hello RDFa WG members,
>>
>> This is a comment on Profiles in the latest RDFa WD [1]. The draft
>>
>> <div about="#person">
>> <dt>Job title</dt>
>> <dd class="job" property="jobtitle"></dd>
>> </div>
>>
>> After RDFa parsing, the following RDF triple is generated from this
>> snippet (assuming a term mapping for jobtitle):
>>
>> <#person> ex:jobtitle "" .
>>
>> I ask that the parsing algorithm be changed so that no triple is generated
>> in the case where an element has a @property attribute, no @content
>> attribute, and no text content.
>>
>> The motivation for this change: Template-generated HTML often contains
>> empty elements like in the example above. This happens when a field is not
>> present in a given record. Generating an empty <td/> or <span/> is often
>> less effort than suppressing the generation of the element altogether, so
>> thats' what template authors often do. When a zero-length element carrying
>> @property is encountered, then it's almost certain that the author's
>> intention was *not* to generate a zero-length literal, so the parsing
>> algorithm should reflect that.
>>
>> Best,
>> Richard
>>
>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-rdfa-core-20100803/
>
> --
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Received on Thursday, 5 August 2010 12:50:54 UTC