Re: XML literals considered textual

Hello Graham,

Many thanks for writing this up. I think you understood
me very well, maybe too well (in the sense that you express
things more pointedly than I would have done).

This certainly describes very well the basic motivation
for adding parseType="Literal" to M&S. It is definitely
not the only possible used of XML in RDF, but these other
uses would not be affected by your points below.

Regards,    Martin.

At 09:41 03/07/09 +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:
>[Some personal thoughts triggered by my understanding of Martin's messages]
>
>Premise:  the primary role of XML literals in RDF is to allow 
>text-with-markup to be captured as well as plain text.
>
>Possible implications:
>
>1. XML literals should be treated as similarly as possible to plain literals.
>
>2. In particular, treatment of xml:lang applied to XML literals should be
>the same as xml:lang applied to plain literals.
>
>3. It may be desirable (but, I think, not essential) to distinguish 
>between plain literals and XML literals in the abstract syntax.  (One 
>possible alternative might be to treat all literals as XML, applying 
>escaping as required to '&' and '<' in plain literals.  Personally, I 
>think this is problematic.)
>
>4. Possible use of XML structures to represent other datatyped values is a 
>secondary consideration.   One might consider other datatypes using XML 
>markup to encode their values, e.g. a complex number datatype with lexical 
>forms like:
>    <real>123.45</real><imag>54.321</image>
>But, parseType="Literal" parsing cannot be used with datatyped literals, 
>and it may be better to use RDF for making composite data structures 
>rather than have two.
>
>5. The intended purpose of XML literals should be made clear in the RDF 
>specifications, if only for the benefit of future working groups.
>
>I deliberately do not try to formulate any detailed conclusions at this time.
>
>#g
>
>
>-------------------
>Graham Klyne
><GK@NineByNine.org>
>PGP: 0FAA 69FF C083 000B A2E9  A131 01B9 1C7A DBCA CB5E

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2003 00:55:20 UTC