Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements

Having seen the email thread, I must admit I found the arguments of both Nathan and Sebastian compelling. I also do not see enough evidence of the harm those triples do; they may indeed be meaningless but we have even more meaningless triples that RDFa generates (e.g., the <> xhv:styleheet <uri> are really really meaningless from and RDF point of view, because they are relevant for the presentation of the HTML file only, and they still pollute all RDF files generated from RDFa...).

My present opinion is not to change anything, although I am sure that the discussion with Richard will continue and may change my opinion...

Ivan




On Sep 5, 2010, at 16:55 , Manu Sporny wrote:

> If there are no objections to this proposal in 14 days, we will close
> ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements.
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/40
> 
> We have traditionally gone to great lengths to not generate useless
> triples. This is in that same vein - an attempt to not generate useless
> triples. Having a triple like the following is mostly useless:
> 
> <> foo:bar "".
> 
> While one could make the argument that the existence of the triple could
> trigger some sort of behavior, the much stronger counter-argument is
> that, due to templating engines and lazy programming, there will be far
> more useless triples generated than useful triples.
> 
> I propose that we change the RDFa Core processing rules such that an
> element that contains a @property attribute, no @content attribute, and
> no text content will not generate a triple.
> 
> Please comment in 14 days from this post if you object to this proposal.
> If there are no objections within 14 days, the specification text will
> be added and ISSUE-40 will be closed.
> 
> -- manu
> 
> -- 
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
> President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: WebID - Universal Login for the Web
> http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2010/08/07/webid/2/
> 


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Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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