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

At 09:03 26/06/03 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>The idea of having treating these two the same
>seemed to mix layers in our design in distasteful ways...
> >          <dc:title>A Midsummer Night's Dream</dc:title>
>
> >          <dc:title rdf:parseType='Literal'>A Midsummer Night's 
> Dream</dc:title>
>
>I explained that this could be handled by the parser
>(i.e. they'd result in the same graph, which would make
>their denotations line up naturally); that was less
>distasteful than what some folks thought the proposal was:
>that they'd be different graph terms but have the same denotation.
>But even so, the idea that you wouldn't know what sort of
>term you have until you reached </dc:title> was unacceptable
>to several in the group.

Speaking for myself, and my understanding of our discussion...

What I found "distasteful" was the suggestion that one would have to look 
*inside* the content of a literal to figure out what type it is.  In 
discussion, I understood the request to be for:

[[
<dc:title rdf:parseType='Literal'>
   A Midsummer Night's Dream
</dc:title>
]]

to denote a plain string literal, but

[[
<dc:title rdf:parseType='Literal'>
   <em>A Midsummer Night's Dream</em>
</dc:title>
]]

to be a completely different kind of literal denoting an XML document in 
some way (because of the presence of markup).

(I originally read Martin's note to suggest that an XML document is itself 
just a string of Unicode characters, not distinguished from non-XML 
strings.  That is a position I could support but with which others have 
expressed concerns.)

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>
PGP: 0FAA 69FF C083 000B A2E9  A131 01B9 1C7A DBCA CB5E

Received on Friday, 27 June 2003 14:07:48 UTC