CURIE review from SWD WG

This is a review of:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-curie-20080506/
on behalf of the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group.

Contents:

1. General
2. Picky Wordsmithing
3. Personal Comment

1. General

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group endorses this Last Call Working Draft, and notes that it is in accordance with the RDFa specification that we have jointly worked on.

We believe that more widespread adoption of CURIEs will benefit the Semantic Web community, and that it is of benefit to the Semantic Web community to have this separate specification.

2. Picky Wordsmithing

Abstract:

OLD:
[[
The aim of this document is to outline a syntax for expressing URIs in a generic, abbreviated syntax. While it has been produced in conjunction with the XHTML 2 Working Group, it is not specifically targeted at use by XHTML Family Markup Languages. Note that the target audience for this document is Language designers, not the users of those Languages.
]]

SUGGESTED:
[[
This document provides a generic, abbreviated syntax for expressing URIs forming an extension to the use of QNames as abbreviations. This syntax is intended to be used as a common element by language designers. Target languages include, but are not limited to, XML languages. The intended audience for this document is Language designers, not the users of those Languages.
]]

Section 3:

The review was done with section 7 of RDFa alongside.

First para:
OLD:
[[
A CURIE is by definition a syntactic superset of a QName. It is comprised ...
]]

SUGGESTED:
[[
The following definition makes the set of CURIEs a syntactic superset of the set of QNames,
providing a migration path. 

It is comprised ...
]]

OLD:
[[
Note that while the set of IRIs represents the lexical space of a CURIE, the value space is the set of URIs (IRIs after canonicalization - see [IRI]).
]]

SUGGESTED (from RDFa section 7):
[[
Note that while the lexical space of a CURIE is as defined in *curie* above, the value space is the set of IRIs.
]]

OLD:
[[
does not conform the constraints
]]

SUGGESTED:
[[
does not conform to the constraints
]]

OLD:
[[
Language designers SHOULD only use CURIEs (or safe_curies) as the datatype of new attributes in their markup language, since using them in values where historically an attribute has taken a URI as its datatype could break backward compatibility.
]]

SUGGESTED:
[[
When revising a language that has historically permitted URIs in certain locations (e.g. as values of a specific attribute), then to ensure backward compatibility, language designers SHOULD NOT permit CURIEs (or safe_curies) as the datatype in the corresponding location, but SHOULD provide a new mechanism (e.g. a new attribute).
]]

RATIONALE:
The intent is not to restrict using CURIEs to only attribute values, but to prohibit certain ill-advised silent modifications.

References:

Suggest including authors/editors of the various documents.

3. Personal Comment

Our reviewer, Jeremy Carroll from TopQuadrant adds:

Within the TopBraid Suite we put great emphasis on having human readable identifiers.
We encourage the use of rdfs:label, but use QNames as a fall-back mechanism.
As this new CURIE specification rolls out and possibly impacts languages still in development such as N3 and Turtle, this will allow us to improve the readability of the labels produced by our fall-back mechanism.


In addition we note that our reviewer made a separate comment:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/2008JulSep/0023
which we trust is being addressed in the usual way.



Jeremy

Received on Monday, 22 September 2008 19:46:34 UTC