rdf:XMLLiteral and the RDF namespace

While debugging my RDFa extractor implementation, I found that if the source XHTML document does not contain a definition of the RDF namespace, I can't process XML literals which are explicitly typed using @datatype="rdf:XMLLiteral".

In a nutshell, since @datatype is defined as a CURIE, the attribute value "rdf:XMLLiteral" should be resolved to:

    http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#XMLLiteral<BLOCKED::http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#XMLLiteral>

... however it can only do this if the rdf prefix is properly defined in the XHTML document.

It seems to me that either:

1) the RDF prefix and namespace should be obligatory if the datatype rdf:XMLLiteral is used
or
2) RDFa parsers should interpret "rdf:XMLLiteral" literally. (And I guess it should not be possible to reuse the "rdf" prefix to define an arbitrary namespace)

Thoughts anyone?

Regards,
C.


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