- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 02:29:02 -0500
- To: guha@alpiri.com
- CC: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@upclink.com>, Sergey Melnik <melnik@db.stanford.edu>, Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, rdf core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
"R.V.Guha" wrote: > > Ok, Aaron, you hit the nail on the head. > > RDF absolutely has to make sense even outside the context of > an enclosing document which can be given a uri. so ... So... what? That doesn't make any sense to me. An RDF document is an XML document. Each XML document has a base URI (cf the infoset spec). If you copy the contents from one place in the web to another, you get a different XML document, and hence a difference RDF document; if it uses relative URI references, the resulting triples may be different. This is by design. This design does allow users to goof, but it also allows folks to manage collections of documents and by and large, it has succeeded over the course of the last 10 years. Noone is forced to use relative URI references; anyone who uses them does so by choice. Surely the consequences of that choice for RDF documents should be the same as the consequences for HTML, XML, PDF, and other document formats in the Web, no? Or rather: surely the the consequences *are* the same for RDF as for XML in general; we're not designing RDF 1.0 today; we're just clarifying the spec; and the spec is already pretty clear on this: [[[ The value of the about attribute is interpreted as a URI-reference per Section 4 of [URI]. The corresponding resource identifier is obtained by resolving the URI-reference to absolute form as specified by [URI]. ]]] -- Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/ Wed, 24 Feb 1999 14:45:07 GMT The only question is about this sort of fuzzy text: [[[ The ID attribute signals the creation of a new resource ... ]]] But this text in particular suggests pretty strongly that rdf:ID="foo" means the same thing as rdf:about="#foo" : [[[ The ID attribute, if specified, provides the URI fragment identifier for c. ]]] -- section 6. Formal Grammar for RDF -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Friday, 15 June 2001 03:30:10 UTC