[comment HTTP in RDF ] Body Property content in base64 instead of string

Hi,
This is a comment about 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-HTTP-in-RDF-20061220/#body

In 2.4. Body Property, it is said:

   The body property represents an HTTP entity body as defined
   in [RFC 2616]. It can appear in nodes of both type Request or
   Response. HTTP bodies are series of bytes. Thus they MUST be
   translated to a string of text using the Base64 encoding
   scheme to make it representable in RDF.

This is puzzling. 

In 2.7 CDATA Sections, (XML Rec, 4th ed.)
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-20060816/#sec-cdata-sect

   Definition: CDATA sections may occur anywhere character data
   may occur; they are used to escape blocks of text containing
   characters which would otherwise be recognized as markup.
   CDATA sections begin with the string "<![CDATA[" and end with
   the string "]]>":]

An XML parser will ignore the markup inside a CDATA section and just parse a string of text, which is the intended purpose of the definition above. Then why there is a need to encode as base64, which add another layer of shadow.

If it's a problem with RDF, why not just using the datatype "string" on "http:body"" Property:

   rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string"





Title: "HTTP Vocabulary in RDF"
URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-HTTP-in-RDF-20061220/
Date: 2007-01-17
Status: 1st WD

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Wednesday, 17 January 2007 03:09:07 UTC