- From: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 13:00:08 +0100
- To: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
> Jeremy Carroll wrote: > > There was agreement with the treatment of equality proposed. Brian McBride wrote: > > Jeremy, please can you explain why we need f*. Why not just f? Out of context that could be misinterpreted :-). The argument, which is not bullet-proof, goes like this. For general purpose applications our analysis suggests f, this is hence our recommendation. However, we do not wish to tie the hands of application developers who have specific linguistic needs. Thus the f* can be read as true by an application developer who may have a strong default to some given language. e.g. a small company developing tools specifically for the US Hispanic market may have a default language tag value of "es-US" (I think that's the right one). Then any RDF input which doesn't say it isn't is then interpreted as "es-US". e.g. in the same scenario, the software tool might need to have a small footprint database and when an RDF file is loaded irrelevant triples are immediately discarded. These are distinguished by not having language tag "es-US". This does seem to give real advantage for f* in this scenario. I don't find this argument convincing; but conversely I am not sufficiently persuaded that it is the wrong way to go to want to prohibit it. In many ways my argument that we are talking about the syntactic equivalence of terms rather than a language processing model rather goes against this; & the use of xml:lang="es-US" on the rdf:RDF tag addresses the default language issue. A further point, is that in M&S xml:lang processing is optional. f* is hence justified by backward compatibility. The * in f* is the difference between SHOULD and MUST. Bill, do you have anything to add here? Jeremy
Received on Monday, 17 September 2001 07:55:35 UTC