Re: Proposal to drop S from consideration

Jeremy Carroll wrote:

> I feel Patrick has raised some legimate issues here.
> 
> Principally, I understand his message as a vote in the "cannot live with"
> category against S; with a coherent explanantion of why: backward
> compatibility.


All of my code and all of the code I've seen from other apps
assumes that the object of
	<dc:title>abc</dc:title>
is a string of 3 characters. S is completely backwards
compatible with this.


> An additional aspect that has come up on WOW is that S is not consistent
> with standard XML usage in which strings are implicitly type converted as
> necessary e.g.
> 
> <record>
>   <name>Fred</name>
>   <age>40</age>
> </record>


Note that it'sn not the XML parser that type converts "40", but
the application that knows about <age>. The analagous situation
in RDF is: the object of <age> is a string, and the range
of the age property is a numeral, not a number. [this
is the case in S]


> I, too, feel much more confortable with P, with some additional typing
> mechanism, such as that suggested by Patrick.
> 
> 
>>I.e.:
>>
>>     SUBJ PRED _:OBJ .
>>     _:OBJ rdf:value "LIT" .
>>     _:OBJ rdf:type TYPE .
>>
>>and/or
>>
>>     SUBJ PRED "LIT" .
>>     PRED rdfs:range TYPE .
>>
> 
> I am increasingly concerned about how many changes we feel entitled to make
> under our charter.



You see S as a change? I don't. It's the way I've read
the RDF spec since 1997 or so.

 >

 I agree with Patrick that S is explicitly out of scope
> according to our current charter. I am concerned that the chair is taking an
> increasingly broad view of what changes we may make.
> 
> However, I have not strongly objected to S, and continue to not do so, on
> the understanding  that we were explicitly permitting our datatyping
> discussions to go out of charter. i.e. I believe our intent was to make the
> *right* decision on datatyping, and then, if that decision was not one we
> could make within our charter we would seek a modification of our charter.
> 
> I do not think that S is the right decision, but, apparantly unlike Patrick,
> I think I can live with it.
> 
> Jeremy
> 



-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Monday, 26 November 2001 09:36:24 UTC