Re: W3C TAG Response to CURIE Last Call (PR#8055)

Henry,

Thanks for your comment.  The working group will no doubt review your 
comment and have a formal response.  Just to clarify something though, 
the XML concept of "default namespace" does not necessarily apply to 
CURIEs.  CURIEs *do* permit the use of a "default prefix" and its 
mapping (an item that is preceded by ONLY a colon), and do ALSO permit a 
collection of host language-defined "reserved values" (an item that is 
preceded by NOTHING).  There are a variety of arcane reasons for this, 
but I understand your confusion.  These various states are described in 
[1].  And while it is possible that we do not have to permit this 
variation, doing so will make it more difficult for us to help people 
who are seemingly allergic to colons from adopting modules that rely 
upon CURIEs - RDFa, Role, Access, etc.

I will look closely at [1] to see if there is a way to ensure the above 
is clearer.  If you have any suggestions, please send them along.

[1] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2008/ED-curie-20081008/#s_syntax

Henry S. Thompson wrote:
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> I've looked through the new draft [1], and without prejudice to any
> official TAG response, I have one remaining personal issue.
>
> I see that you have clarified the syntax so that it is clear that
> e.g. :foo is a valid CURIE.  But the discussion of what IRI a CURIE
> represents doesn't respect the distinction you are depending on wrt
> 'foo' vs. ':foo', namely "default prefix" versus "default namespace"
> (which is pretty obscure, it has to be said -- do you really _have_ to
> do this?  It blows the syntactic parallel between element
> names/attribute names/QNames and CURIES. . .).
>
> In particular, no mention of default namespace is made in the crucial
> paragraph (the one which begins "CURIEs are an abbreviation for
> strings").  I suggest you separate out and promote the definition of
> the mapping, for instance give a three-bullet quasi-formal
> specification of the CURIE->IRI mapping, possibly twice (once for XML
> languages and once for non-XML languages), _before_ this paragraph,
> possibly in its own sub-section.
>
> ht
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2008/ED-curie-20081008/
> - -- 
>        Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
>                          Half-time member of W3C Team
>       10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
>                 Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
>                        URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
> [mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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Received on Thursday, 16 October 2008 18:42:04 UTC