RE: XML observation

Sorry for my delay in answering over the weekend.
And please don't remove the I18N IG mailing list address.

At 11:59 03/07/07 -0500, pat hayes wrote:

>>>  - Whereas the XML conventions for real datatypes in many ways can be
>>>     taken as just a notational convention for abstract concepts such as
>>>     'integer' that RDF treats as abstract concepts, in the case of
>>>     XML literals, we are dealing with marked-up text, and so there the
>>>     abstraction we are dealing with is XML, not just the notation.
>>>     (if RDF would want to create their own abstraction of marked-up
>>>     text, that would be a different thing, but currently, it doesn't)
>>
>>Again, you seem to be presuming that if it is an XML literal, it
>>is natural language content. That presumption unfounded.
>
>In fact, the very existence of RDF/XML illustrates this. Like it or not, 
>RDF/XML is legal XML, so can itself be enclosed in an RDF XML literal; but 
>one would not expect that RDF/XML to inherit any attributes of the outer 
>RDF/XML.

Yes, you can. But that's not the primary goal of XML literals, and
that's not what they are usually used for. Let's not design things
so that we can make a point, but so that they are most useful for
what they are most used for.

And by the way, coming back to one of the main points, plain literals
do inherit language information from the context (if there is such
information), and there is always xml:lang="" if that's not desirable,
and on the other hand, there is no guarantee that plain literals are
natural text.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 8 July 2003 10:04:51 UTC