- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 11:06:09 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@upclink.com>
- cc: Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@baltimore.com>, <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Aaron Swartz wrote: > Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@Baltimore.com> wrote: > > > Moving containers out of the core works for me. I think it's far from > > clear that the specified way of representing collections is always the > > best, and (history aside) don't see why it should have such distinguished > > status. > > I'd love to move containers out of the core, but I just don't believe it's > feasible because of the special interpretation of the rdf:li element. Which > is really too bad, because I'd love to massively simplify the core. [...] I suspect we tend to talk past ourselves a little, with phrases such as "move out of the core", "distinguished status" etc. We have various things "in the core" in the sense of being specified in one of the specs owned by the RDF Core WG. Beyond that, we have not really defined a more precise technical sense of "being in the rdf core". There is, with rdf containers, a sense in which they have to date been privileged, distinguished etc over and above merely being defined by an RDF Core WG specification: containers get a special mention in the 'rdf formal model' part of the spec. We might say they are 'architecturally privileged' in the RDF model specification. The proposal I am writing up this week is to remove this; we can nevertheless leave container-specific constructs in the syntax. Containers are also, as you point out, syntactically privileged in the RDF syntax specification. But then, so is the rdf:type construct: we can write <wn:Person foaf:name="dan"/> instead of a more verbose piece of XML, because the RDF syntax provides sugar for common idioms. The container machinery in the syntax is in the same category... Dan
Received on Tuesday, 12 June 2001 11:06:21 UTC