some more comments on XML Syntax

There are several questions in-line in
   http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/Arch/XML_Syntax
that I think are best answered in e-mail.  (That page has already gotten
to be very hard to read, with comments from four people.)   I've also
tried to clean up the page a bit.

* There was a link to
  "http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/Arch/XML_Syntax#preview" 
  which doesn't make sense.  I removed it.

* Adrian writes:
       We do need to choose property names that indicate relationships
       between classes, rather than just repeat the class
       name. E.g. "Person has a companion that is a Dog" will look
       better when serialized than "Person has a dog that is a Dog". 
  I agree, but that's a comment on the abstract syntax, not the XML
  syntax, I think.

* I clarified 1.2 and 1.3, and removed comments from Adrian and Gary,
  because I think my re-writes address them (or at least change what
  they need to say).

* Gary writes:
      "name v. ref makes it clear whether you are "defining" a new Dog
      or referencing a Dog" 
  Yeah, RDF and OWL intentionally don't do that -- they see no
  difference between a "definition" and a "reference" -- in either case
  you're just providing some more information about something.  For RIF,
  I think it's fine to say the first occurance in a serialization
  provides all the properties.

* in 3.4 -- I'm just talking about re-using the b-node syntax hack, to
  fit "local names" where the parser is expecting a URI.   I should
  re-write that section to explain that, somehow.  (or someone can beat
  me to it....)

* in 3.5 
      <Dog id="ns:taiko">
  is considered by many to be a bad design because it combines the xml
  namespace prefixes with the URI scheme names, with possibly confusing
  results.  Someday, the IETF might define a URI scheme called "ns", and
  then the software which used xmlns:ns wouldn't be able to use that
  scheme.  More likely, some vendor might start to deploy "xml" URIs
  which would cause unexpected conflicts with the reserved xml namespace
  prefix in some implementations.  Other people think this is a paranoid
  fantasy and that we shouldn't worry about it.

  (Or were you thinking the id would ONLY be a qname, and never a raw
  URI?   If so, that doesn't work because some URIs (like ones that end
  in "/") cannot be written as qnames.)

* I haven't studied Gary's semi-stripe-skipping design enough to have an
  opinion or comments on it yet, sorry!

      -- Sandro

Received on Tuesday, 22 May 2007 02:48:11 UTC