Re: pfps-04 (why the thread is germane to pfps-04)

Hello Peter,

At 09:27 03/07/25 -0400, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
>I believe that a complete theory of equality for XML literals resolves this
>comment.  I suggest that several test cases be added to the RDF test suite.
>
>The related issue of whether the value spaces of xsd:string and plain
>literals are disjoint also appears to be well on the way to resolution.

Apart from the issue of language information (plain literals can take
language information, xsd:string can't), what is the reason for making
these two disjoint? We seem to get into a serious proliferation of
string-related datatypes that provide no useful distinction.
In RDF, the simple text "Hello World" (without language information)
can be a plain literal, an xsd:string, and an XML literal.
What is the point of them all being different if there is no
observable difference?


>PS: Although the current situation may be technically satisfactory in this
>area, the pain in getting there suggests that a slightly different
>description of XML literals might be more useful, perhaps something along
>the line of making the value space of XML literals in RDF be some abstract
>set with equality defined as per exclusive XML canonicalization and
>explicitly determined to be disjoint from the value space of plain RDF
>literals and also from the XSD value spaces.  This would also probably make
>the XML guys much more happy.

I have proposed something like this just a day or two ago. It would
definitely make I18N quite a bit happier, because it would not be
a straightforward violation of the Character Model, and would indeed
be much more in line with the XML spec.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Friday, 25 July 2003 16:33:35 UTC