Re: Choosing the best of three alternatives

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Patrick Stickler wrote:

> It would be useful, I think, if we could have a straw poll, either
> during today's telecon or via email, between the following three
> alternatives for the treatment of XML literals.
>
> Votes should be "prefer", "can't live with", "can live with". Only
> one alternative should be specified as preferred.
>
> --
>
> Alternative 0:   (no change)
>
> --
>
> Alternative 1: XML literals are plain literals
>
> --
>
> Alternative 2: three types of literal

There has been a polarity of opinion expressed as to whether all XML
forms are text-carrying or some might be data structures "not for human
consumption". Since I lean to the latter view, I'm uninclined to lump
XML lierals and "plain" literals together.

Where XML formats are intended to carry text, I hope they'd follow I18N
guidelines and have appropriate elements for expressing language (like
xhtml does). If those XML formats don't have these elements, I'd
consider them broken.

However, where XML formats are inteded to express "data structures" with
no obvious reason to carry language information, they ought to be free
to go without.

Where XML Literals are embedded in RDF, I'd expect to be able to use the
provided features of a particular XML format (/schema) to carry language
information if I wanted to express content language.

That is, I'd expect to be able to (to have to?) put language tags
_within the embedded XML fragment_ if appropriate.

However, as to whether language specifications "in scope" in RDF/XML
should carry into embedded XML literals, this seems like one of those
implementatio calls that could be argued either way. I'd be inclined to
avoid it but have no strong view on this.


So probably:

Prefer alternative 0.

Really dislike alternative 1. Could live with, but I probably wouldn't
use "RDF XML Literals" to embed XML Literals.

Could live with alternative 2, but dislike the reintroduction of
additional literal types.



-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
On modesty: whoever said "it's hard being perfect" obviously wasn't me.

Received on Friday, 11 July 2003 10:00:20 UTC