RE: [Fwd: Re: Summary of strings, markup, and language tagging in RDF (resend)]

On Mon, 2003-07-07 at 09:32, Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:
> > 3. For the common use case, where applications embed a 
> > literal in an XML
> > document, it is preferable to distinguish,in the graph, between plain
> > and XML literals, so that e.g. different escaping conventions can be
> > applied.
> 
> By this, do you mean, that the reason why we have special
> treatment of XML literals at all, in addition to fully generic
> support for plain and typed literals, is simply because RDF
> uses XML for its serialization. If RDF used some other serialization
> as standard, such as N3, then the need for the special datatype
> would not exist (insofar as the need for the RDF specs to define
> it)?

I largely agree with what you said there, but that isn't what I was
trying to say.  I was trying to suggest that for the typical use case of
embedding a literal in an XML document, then the following code fragment
is typical:

  if (literal instanceof XmlLiteral) {
    write(literal);
  } else {
    write(escapeReservedXMLChars(literal));
  }

This of course is not the only way to do things.

My attempt, to make in part the point you make Patrick, was in the
section about it being architecturaly inappropriate to put XML specific
stuff in the core RDF model.

Brian

> 
> If so, I agree.
> 
> Thus, XML literals are not singled out because XML is by itself
> more special than some other lexicalization, but because it
> simply intersects with RDF's own serialization and it's very
> useful to keep track of that in a standardized manner.
> 
> --
> 
> I couldn't think of anything else you didn't cover.
> 
> Patrick

Received on Monday, 7 July 2003 05:59:08 UTC