RE: Type of (the denotation of) a plain literal

At 11:31 AM 1/17/03 +0000, Brian McBride wrote:

>At 11:59 17/01/2003 +0100, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>
>>3: the semantics document should say clearly (I don't know if it does) that
>>the denotation of an untyped literal without a language identifier is the
>>unicode string.
>>(Dan felt strongly about this, and no one else objected)
>
>
>   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/TR/WD-rdf-mt-20030117/#urisandlit
>
>[[he meaning of a literal is principally determined by its character 
>string: it either refers to the value mapped from the string by the 
>associated datatype, or if no datatype is provided then it refers to the 
>literal itself, which is either a unicode character string or a pair of a 
>string with a language tag.]]

At risk of repeating myself, I still think there's a lack of clarify here, 
when all relevant documents are read together.

The above text can be read that a character string may be some part of a 
literal, so a literal is not actually a character string.  Later, the same 
document says that for a plain literal, I(E)=E, so whatever a plain literal 
may be in the abstract syntax is also its denotation.

In view of Jeremy's comment, I think the WG intent is that a plain literal 
without a language tag denotes a Unicode character string.  In light of 
I(E)=E, that means said literal in the abstract syntax must be a Unicode 
character string.  I don't think that's clear.  It wouldn't take much to 
make it so.

I'm not yet fully understanding what fix Peter Patel-Schneider is 
requesting, but I suspect that whatever that is may also clarify this 
matter in some way.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>

Received on Friday, 17 January 2003 07:21:22 UTC