- From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 09:49:50 +0100 (BST)
- To: Dave Beckett <dave.beckett@bristol.ac.uk>
- cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Thu, 24 May 2001, Dave Beckett wrote:
> However, I have thought of another problem. XML parsers (I think) are
> not required to let applications distinguish between:
>
> <elm/>
> and
> <elm></elm>
>
> The only reference I can find to it is:
>
> Appendix D: What is not in the Information Set
> 7. The difference between the two forms of an empty element: <foo/> and <foo></foo>.
> -- XML InfoSet http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/#omitted
We're all in agreement here (as far as I can tell) that the two forms
above should have the same interpretation (this has been made more or
less explicit by various people).
This kind of led to the suggestion that an RDF grammar should be given
in terms of the XML infoset rather than a BNF grammar producing a stream
of characters. Certainly coping with empty elements explicitly wherever
they might crop up in the current grammar would obfuscate it (in my
opinion). And we'd have no future-proofing when XML-foo invented
something useful that we wanted to take advantage of when serialising
RDF as XML.
Perhaps we might stick with a simple grammar for serialised RDF and
include something to the effect:
"any stream of XML tokens that is equivalent to this
serialisation (wrt. {a subset of the XML infoset})
is also a valid serialised form, and should be
interpreted equivalently."
--
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
On modesty: whoever said "it's hard being perfect" obviously wasn't me.
Received on Friday, 25 May 2001 04:51:16 UTC