Re: Issue xmlsch-10 "canonical syntax" proposal to close

Dave,

a few wordsmithing suggestions along the lines you suggest.

At 11:12 24/04/2003 +0100, Dave Beckett wrote:


>Summary: reject (out of charter)

postpone (technically infeasible within charter)

[...]

>which is pretty much all commentary and one thing, the issue:
>   [[
>   At the very least we would encourage you to specify a single
>   canonical form, probably strictly striped, which could be defined
>   by an XML Schema or DTD.
>   ]]
>
>
>Here is a draft response:
>
>[[
>The RDF Core WG has considered your last call comment captured in
>
>    http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/20030123-issues/#xmlsch-10
>
>(raised in section
>  "4.4. Normative specification of XML grammar (policy, substantive)" of
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0489.html )
>
>and decided
>
>    URL-HERE
>
>to reject it.
>
>
>A canonical syntax for RDF/XML - a syntax format that matched the RDF
>abstract syntax one-to-one - was something that the RDF Core WG
>considered.  However it was already known that RDF/XML could not
>express all RDF graphs:
>   http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/#section-Serialising
>(this has got better with the addition of the rdf:nodeID construct)
>and was unconstrained in the choice of XML qnames when it was
>designed in 1999.
>
>This means RDF/XML isn't very suitable for defining with an XML
>schema language such as W3C XML Schema or DTDs.  This would have
>meant inventing a new XML format, which was out of RDF Core's
>charter:
>   [[The RDF Core WG is neither chartered to develop a new RDF syntax, ...]]
>   -- http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCoreWGCharter
>
>For testing purposes, RDF Core did design a small and complete
>non-XML format called N-Triples which has proved very useful in
>precisely writing down test cases from WG decisions but isn't
>suitable as an end-user canonical syntax.
>
>We appreciate the XML Schema WG's offer for help with design of new
>XML syntaxes.
>
>]]


Suggest:

[[

...

>A canonical subset of RDF/XML was considered by the RDF Core WG.  However 
>the WG believes that due to the way mixed namespaces are used in RDF/XML 
>it is not possible to define such a subset that:

  a) can represent all the RDF graphs that RDF/XML can represent
  b) can be described by an DTD or  by XML Schema.

An alternative would be to define a new syntax that is describable with a 
DTD or an XML Schema but doing so is beyond the scope of RDFCore's current 
charter.  We note that the XHTML WG have expressed interest in working on 
such a syntax and have been encouraged to do so by RDFCore.  RDFCore also 
welcomes XML Schema's offer to help with this work.

We have added this issue to the RDFCore postponed issues list.

   URL here

]]

Received on Thursday, 24 April 2003 07:57:08 UTC