- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:03:27 +0100
- To: kifer@cs.sunysb.edu (Michael Kifer)
- Cc: Axel Polleres <axel.polleres@deri.org>, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, Chris Welty <cawelty@gmail.com>, "Public-Rif-Wg (E-mail)" <public-rif-wg@w3.org>
On 22 Apr 2008, at 19:46, Michael Kifer wrote: > With your ability to pull things out of context, you should explore > joining > the current political campaign down here... You clearly started with the escalation and seem perfectly happy to continue it endlessly. I'll try not to respond in kind, but these sorts of insults are just plain frustrating and unbecoming. There was no out of context. My observation stands: if you call something a presentation syntax, people will expect it to be a concrete, human usable syntax. Calling the OWL Abstract Syntax an abstract syntax didn't stop people from treating it as a concrete usable syntax. You recently tried to make this point in several email containing responses to people wherein you made the point the presentation syntax is not a concrete syntax. My point is that this has several drawbacks, including that people won't treat it as a non-concrete syntax, however unspecified it is. Do what you like. > Here is my position on the presentation syntax issue: > > 1. Ideally, the pres syntax should be a parsable language. > We started with that years ago, but some people were adamantly > opposed. Fine. > 2. If not 1, then the presentation syntax should be as simple as > possible, > and its primary use should be semantics+examples. > Some simple shortcuts are ok, but they should really be simple > and not > ugly hacks. > 3. If possible, use a slightly restricted version of the presentation > syntax to define a real language. Given the experience with 1, this > should be non-normative. > If this discussion opens the eyes of those who were against #1 then > we should go back to 1. > But we no longer have the time for that or #3 in this phase. That's fine too. But then there is the fact, I believe, that people won't respect any "don't use this syntax" warnings. Perhaps that's not the worst thing, perhaps it is. There's clearly some interest in the WG (e.g., from Axel) in making the presentation syntax a concrete syntax. (FWIW, calling it Presentation makes it, in my opinion, even more likely to be treated by people as the human readable syntax. It certainly suggests presentation *to users*.) Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Tuesday, 22 April 2008 19:05:38 UTC