- From: Stephen Petschulat/CanWest/IBM <spetschu@ca.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 22:51:50 -0700
- To: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
I missed some of the recent discussion on this issue in the ns-prefix thread due to holidays, but as Martyn & others pointed out, it seems clear that by and large people want this feature gone from the core: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001May/0112.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001May/0123.html For those not familiar with the issue, here is a quick summary: aboutEachPrefix was introduced to deal with the case where a web site developer may want to assert something about a (potentially large) number of resources on their site such as "all the documents under the directory http://www.mysite.com/secure/ require a password" where the URI is a substring prefix. M&S uses the example of copyright: <rdf:Description aboutEachPrefix="http://foo.org/doc"> <s:Copyright>© 1998, The Foo Organization</s:Copyright> </rdf:Description> This would pattern match http://foo.org/doc/doc1.pdf, http://foo.org/doc/doc2.pdf, etc. There are a number of obvious problems: - why just a prefix substring? what about port numbers messing up the prefix match? why not full pattern matching? [1] [2] - aboutEachPrefix is described in the syntax, but not in the model [3] - it is difficult to implement [4] [5] - it creates problems for the formal model [6] In addition, TimBL weighs in with "yes, abouteachprefix was a mistake in retrospect." [7] Is this an open & shut case or is there a group with a vested interest in it (web developers?) that may want it to stay in? I don't know all of the history of it, but perhaps some of the participants of the original WG can shed some light on this. If no one speaks up in its defense, I assume deprecation is the right route. cheers, - steve [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Oct/0015.html [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Sep/0003.html [3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2001Apr/0349.html [4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Sep/0134.html [5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Feb/0109.html [6] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2000JulSep/0034.html [7] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Feb/0172.html Stephen Petschulat Common Architecture and Strategy Team Center for IBM e-business Innovation::Vancouver 4611 Canada Way, Burnaby, BC, Canada Phone: 1-604-297-3231 Fax: 1-604-297-3040
Received on Wednesday, 30 May 2001 01:56:54 UTC