Re: Meaning of Alt

Hmmm...

Days of the week seem to be the sort of thing that form a class, not just
random strings. And also to be the sort of class that is useful in a large
number of situations, which again is a good reason for it being more than
just a string.

I think you are look for subtypes (or is it subClasses). But an interesting
twist on alt is the type of alt, which is again something  that might be used
a lot if someone makes an instance of it.

just some thoughts - sorry they are woolly.

Charles McCN

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Ray Fergerson wrote:

  A question about the semantics of the alternative collection type has
  come up here.  We wanted to construct a model in which a property
  could have a range of, for example, the days of the week.  One
  possibility is to declare a Day_Of_The_Week class with instances
  Monday, etc.  An example of this sort is given in the RDF spec.  In
  our model though we really just need strings and not instances.  We
  don't really want properties to be associated with these things.  We
  initially thought that the Alt was an alternative (hummm) that would
  allow us to just have strings.  A closer reading of the spec seems to
  indicate though that the elements of an alternative collection are
  meant to be equivalent is some way yet different in some other,
  unspecified, way.  Thus you might imagine "Monday", "First workday",
  "Lundi" as the elements of an Alt but not "Monday" and "Tuesday".
  
  Is this interpretation of Alt correct?  Are there other ways to
  specify that the value of a property should be a single value from an
  enumerated set (preferably of strings)?
  
  Ray
  

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
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Received on Monday, 4 September 2000 02:02:22 UTC