Re: Summary of strings, markup, and language tagging in RDF (resend)

>On Thu, 2003-07-03 at 02:52, pat hayes wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>>
>>  Since this issue seems to be so centrally important, and since our
>>  design now appears to people like Martin to be so completely
>>  brain-damaged, let me propose that we re-open this issue and change
>>  our design slightly,
>
>Pat, thank you for this proposal (in the same sense of thank you as in
>"thank you for slapping me about the face with a wet fish").

Well, sorry about the wet fish. I thought maybe we could do this 
quickly as a simplification and reversion to an older design that 
nobody was too unhappy with at the time. Hah, silly me.

>Please could you hold that thought for now.
>
>My preferred approach to this discussion is first of all to determine
>whether the simpler, and I suspect less controversial, solution of
>reintroducing the wrapper would satisfy i18n so far as issue b) is
>concerned, which I'm hopeful it would.

Well, but reintroducing the wrapper will cause other people to start 
complaining. And although I have been deliberately keeping quiet 
about this in the past since XML stuff isn't my baliwick, and we had 
finally managed to get rid of it, I think the wrapper idea is 
terrible. It is hard to think of a worse design from an RDF/XML point 
of view. I also think that making rdf:XMLLiteral into a datatype was 
a mistake on other (semantic) grounds, but again I have been 
deliberately not rocking the boat. But since Martin tells us that the 
boat has a hole in it, and one can  see that the hole was caused by 
one of our decisions, seems to me that there is an obvious way to 
repair it.  And by the way, if you read the current version of the 
Semantics, you will see that the entire semantics for XML literals in 
RDF is stated without actually mentioning or requiring that it be 
considered a datatype: in fact,

rdf:XMLLiteral rdf:type rdfs:Datatype .

isnt even true in RDF interpretations. So the change would be trivial 
from the semantic, syntactic and Ntriples points of view.  The only 
substantial change would be to the Concepts document.

>RDFCore can then decide whether to accept I18N's arguments that the
>present design should be changed.  *If* they do, then they can decide
>how best to address those requirements.
>
>Can you live with that?

I bow to your Chairmanship and will not pursue the matter for now. 
Just put on record that I think Jeremy's arguments are spurious, that 
Martin's opinion should be taken as authoritative on I18N matters, 
that Patrick's response is beside the point, and that I will argue 
the points vigorously if the discussion continues.

Pat

>Brian
>
>The WG

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Received on Thursday, 3 July 2003 11:57:38 UTC