Re: xml:lang [was Re: Outstanding Issues ]

At 11:02 12/02/2002 +0200, Patrick Stickler wrote:
[...]

> >> A literal is not a pair ("string", "lang"). The M&S is wrong.
> >
> > I was hoping for something a little more compelling than a bald assertion.
>
>Umm.. the assertion was associated with a good bit of
>explanation, both here and elsewhere.

Chapeau at a rakish angle (i.e. part on, part off)

Let me frame this discussion a little, and declare an interest.  I have 
running, publicly available code with a user base.  The code has evolved a 
lot over the past months, but I and the Jena team have worked hard to 
maintain its external interfaces so that the running code of our user base 
would not suddenly break.

I read M&S and it said that language is part of the literal, so that is how 
I wrote the code.  In Jena, a literal is a pair, as defined in M&S.

The Jena team is committed to modifying Jena to track the decisions of the 
WG.  Whatever decision the WG makes on this issue, we will 
implement.  However, I would ask the WG, whether they feel that they would 
owe me, and other developers, an explanation for why, having gone to the 
trouble of implementing the spec correctly, we should be asked to change 
our code.

To be clear Patrick,  I have not seen anything in what you have written 
that  comes close to an explanation of why this change would be a good 
thing.  If there is something I have missed, then could I trouble you 
please to repeat it, or to provide a reference.  I am entirely open to 
being persuaded by good reasons.  However, I do not consider, "because 
Patrick says so" to be a good reason.

A good reason might have the form "If we do it as m&s says, problem x occurs".

[...]

>Then we need to modify the representation of literal nodes
>in the RDF graph to in fact be a pairing of string along
>with (possibly unspecified) language.

That would be an implication of not changing from m&s's current position.

Brian

Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2002 04:49:42 UTC