RE: I18N Issue alternative: collapsing plain and xml literals

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ext pat hayes [mailto:phayes@ihmc.us]
> Sent: 08 September, 2003 22:45
> To: Brian McBride
> Cc: Martin Duerst; Richard Ishida; i18n; w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
> Subject: Re: I18N Issue alternative: collapsing plain and xml literals
> 
> >, and many (all?) current implementations will store
> >"<" in their representation of a graph.  The point to note is that 
> >implementations are free to represent literals any way they please. 
> >Thus "<" is just the way this implementation represents the literal 
> >"&lt;".
> 
> But that is INSANE. Here I am wanting to write an RDF ontology about 
> mathematical expressions, say, and I want to refer to pieces of 
> mathematical text like "2<3" (two is less than three). But now I 
> can't do that because this is short for "2&lt;3", which is completely 
> meaningless.
> 
> The basic point is that the RDF machinery is not intended to be 
> restricted to only REFER to XML text. It is required to be encodable 
> in XML, but it is that already. This proposal makes it impossible to 
> refer to non-XML text.

Well, not necessarily. You could use a typed literal with a 
string-like datatype (e.g. xsd:string) to express such things.

What it simply means is that RDF itself has no plain, simple
string type of any sort, only XML.

If we were starting out at day 1, and designing RDF from scratch,
I could concede certain advantages of such an approach. But we
are far far away from day 1, and to change plain literals to
XML literals at this stage in the game would be dropping an A-bomb
on the RDF community; and to that end, I'm quite surprised that
*anyone* in the WG, much less the chairs, would at this point 
propose such a radical and devastating change.

> .... I would prefer not to accede, since Martin has 
> not responded to the technical objections adequately, and has not 
> given actual technical arguments for his requests. They amount to 
> statements of opinion about the proper role of XML in semiotics, 
> opinions with which one may have legitimate disagreement.

+1

Patrick

Received on Tuesday, 9 September 2003 02:26:25 UTC