Re: RDF's curious literals

Garret Wilson wrote:

> But this begs the same questions that no one seems to want to answer 
> (other than to say simply, "they are needed"):

It seems to me a number of people in this thread have suggested the 
reasons are not entirely technical in nature, but also social (and 
perhaps even political).

Not having been involved in any of this, I wouldn't be surprised if 
there wasn't a fair bit of pressure from the W3C community to have a 
notion of datatype in RDF that could be more-or-less consistent with 
datatypes used in other W3C efforts (say, XML Schema and XQuery). Surely 
that would be a good enough reason, even if it might not be the best 
technical reason.

Standards work is really hard, and it is so precisely because different 
people bring different assessments of quality and priority to the table.

Bruce

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 18:02:08 UTC