- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org>
- Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 11:24:52 -0500
- To: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
- Cc: www-rdf-comments@w3.org, w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org
Martin Duerst wrote: > > Dear RDF WG, > > These are additional internationalization-related comments that > haven't been discussed by the I18N WG yet. Please accept them as > personal comments. They may be confirmed as WG comments next week. > Martin-- Thanks again for your comments on the RDF drafts. Regarding your second message, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003OctDec/0121.html: > > primer, 2.1, first para: It may help translation to change > 'state this in English' to 'state this in a natural language > such as English'. > I'll make the change you suggest. > > primer, fig. 3 and all related examples/discussion: Instead of > http://www.example.org/terms/language, > http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/language should be used. There > is no reason to use a made-up property when there is a well- > defined property from a well-known vocabulary that is used > in the same example. > If you're concerned about making the point that existing vocabularies should be used where possible, it seems to me a better plan would be to explicitly say this later in the section, where the value of using shared vocabularies is discussed. At that point, it could also be pointed out, as an example, that http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/language could be used instead of http://www.example.org/terms/language. I don't see much point in making an extensive change to "all related examples/discussion" to make this point. There is a good reason to use a made-up property in this case: to illustrate that people can make up their own vocabularies (and mix them with others). At that point in the Primer, only three properties have been used in total (not counting the example in Section 1). The Dublin Core vocabulary is already used for one of the properties (in fact, for the first property introduced). The Primer later notes that people can use vocabularies that already exist, and emphasizes the value of doing so. And it seems to me that "later" is the place to get into where vocabularies come from; not in the initial examples that are simply trying to illustrate the use of multiple properties to describe a resource. BTW, no doubt an existing term could be found for every made-up property used in the Primer; and many (most?) readers of the Primer will not consider the Dublin Core vocabulary to be "well-known". > > > primer, section 2.3, fig 5 and related: The address example is on the > boundary of a generic internationalized address. 'postalCode' is > very generic, whereas 'street' and 'state' may not be generic enough. > Also, the address misses the country information. At least this should > be added; the fields can then be understood as country-specific. > This affects a number of places in the Primer (including an example in Section 4.4), and also the Concepts spec (which copies Figure 6). I think people will get the idea (and not be terribly misled) without these changes (which, after all, involve what are intended to be simple illustrations). > > primer, example 22: The explanation mentions 'the escaping of reserved > characters such as ...'. This may be highly misleading. "<" (as a literal > character) already has to be escaped, and ">" already is escaped in > the example. Probably changing to "the uniform escaping or unescaping > of characters" should do the job. On average, there may be more > unescaping of NCRs when canonicalizing than escaping. > I'll make the change you suggest. > > primer, general: a few examples in section 6 use xml:lang. It should be > used much more. > The examples in section 6 are taken from the indicated sources (not made up by me). It seems to me that there is enough use in section 6 to make it clear that its use is an option (and the main purpose of section 6 is to illustrate a range of applications of RDF in the field, not necessarily the use of all RDF/XML facilities). > > In section 6.5, the use of xml:lang for rdfs:label but not for > rdfs:comment is confusing. Does this suggest that rdfs:label > can be in multiple languages, but rdfs:comment can only be > in English? > I don't believe there will be any particular confusion to most readers of the Primer (these examples have been in the Primer for at least a year; no one has mentioned this yet). Anyway, it seems to me that if people are going to read intent into examples like this, *uniformly* using xml:lang could cause equal confusion, by suggesting that its use was required rather than optional. At any rate, these examples are taken from CIM/XML material, and illustrate a valid use of xml:lang. > > primer, section 6.2: Greece in French is written with grave accent, > in HTML as Grèce. > I'll make this change. > > primer, section 6.3: "Unicode information (such as unicode:script)": > It is probably better to change this to "Character usage information > (with properties such as unicode:script)". But the use of an 'Unicode' > namespace prefix may suggest to some reader that this is some official > vocabulary defined by the Unicode consortium. > I'll make the change you suggest to Section 6.3 (and, for parallelism, similar changes to the other examples mentioned here, like "mime:contentType"). Regarding the use of the "unicode" namespace prefix, I can't do much about that, since this is the name the XPackage folks have chosen for this "ontology" (their term). The same problem exists for any namespace prefix that might be used (here or elsewhere), since anyone can locally choose to use a given prefix (it's only the full URIs that are subject to some form of control). If a warning to this effect is needed, I'd prefer to make a general warning in Section 2.2, rather than scattering them all over the Primer. Thanks again. --Frank
Received on Friday, 14 November 2003 10:59:25 UTC