Re: rdf:value history

This is all accurate up to a point, but I bet I'm not the only one having a brief chuckle at the idea of Pat being a "tame" anything :-)  What we needed was what we got!

--Frank

On Jul 6, 2010, at 5:11 PM, Dan Brickley wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 10:24 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
>> A superb piece of historical scholarship.
>> 
>> I would just add my own experiences and memories, which start near the end
>> of Dan's history. I was recruited by Brian McBride to be the tame semantics
>> maven on the RDF WG, and my role for quite a while was restricted to asking
>> the rest of the group what the various RDF constructions were supposed to
>> mean, intuitively, so that I could try to reproduce this understanding in
>> formal terms. In most cases this was fairly straightforward, although not
>> all of the result was deemed worth making normative. But rdf:value was the
>> breaking point. I was never able to get any kind of clear consensus about
>> what rdf:value was supposed to mean. Several group members explicitly did
>> not know what it meant, and those who did gave me at least three different
>> versions of it, all already, apparently, in use, all of which were sharply
>> incompatible with the others. It therefore has, normatively, no normative
>> meaning in RDF. I have my own opinions about this situation, but anyone who
>> has read my emails can probably guess what they are.
> 
> Everyone should have a tame logician! The RDF '97-'99 specs were
> somehow evocative and intriguing, rather than directly implementable.
> For all their flaws today, the revised are vastly tighter and more
> professional than the original that emerged from the 'browser wars'
> era. For being our logic oracle, many thanks :) The rdf:value is
> probably the remaining thing I'd file under "evocative". Unfortunately
> it evokes different expectations in every reader!
> 
> BTW I think the combination of 'unit test' style tests cases
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-testcases/), a fully in-public working group
> whose workflow was based around giving such test cases a formal
> grounding (and for the syntax stuff, an opensource implementation by
> the spec editor)... that was a pretty innovative combination of
> techniques. It might be that we weren't brave enough at the time in
> cutting and tweaking the '90s inheritance, but I still generally hold
> the view we'd all be better off collaborating around tools and data
> than on making new specs...
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Dan
>

Received on Tuesday, 6 July 2010 21:31:42 UTC