- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 13:51:58 -0700
- To: Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@Baltimore.com>
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
>At 12:22 PM 7/25/01 +0100, Dave Beckett wrote: >>One way to escape a character. Check. >> >> [[* Explicit end delimiters MUST be provided. Escapes such as >> \uABCD where the end delimiter is a space or any character other >> than [01-9A-F] SHOULD be avoided: it is not clear visually, and it >> can cause an editor to insert spurious line-breaks when >> word-wrapping on spaces. Forms like SPREAD's &UABCD; [SPREAD] or >> XML's &#xhhhh;, where the escape is explicitly terminated by a >> semicolon, are much better. Escaped characters SHOULD be >> acceptable wherever unescaped characters are. In particular, they >> SHOULD be acceptable in identifiers and comments. >> ]] >> >>Oh dear; the python style things \uABCD are mentioned as should be >>avoided. This is only a recommendation though. >> >>So I propose we provide one way to escape: >> '\u' [A-Fa-f0-9]{1,8} ';' >>which generates the appropriate Unicode code point from 1-8 hex digits. > >Which falls foul of another rule, i.e. inventing a new escaping >mechanism. (I assert that adding the ';' terminator changes the >escape mechanism.) > >It is not clear to me that a fixed-length form like \uxxxx or >\Uxxxxxxxx actually breaks the rule given above: it depends on >one's interpretation of "delimiter": counting is a well-established >way of delimiting values in some kinds of structure. I concur. My reading of the rule is that the use of a special character as an 'end' delimiter should be avoided. BTW, are N-triples really only an in-group convenience, or are people thinking that we are going to endorse it as a public standard? If so, I would like to reconsider the line-oriented nature of the syntax, which strikes me as being archaic for a serious standard these days, and will break immediately the language is extended to anything more complicated. Pat --------------------------------------------------------------------- (650)859 6569 w (650)494 3973 h (until September) phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Thursday, 26 July 2001 16:51:49 UTC