- From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 17:45:33 -0500
- To: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>, "Seth Russell" <seth@robustai.net>
- Cc: "RDF-IG" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
This is a good point. The colons drive most right-minded people crazy, unless one is mixing languages anyway in which case the prefixes help. The problem is this. There is a clash with keywords. There are of course a limited number of keywords, such as bind, @prefix, a, has, of, to which I am tempted to add with time (which?...). Any language which uses a set of special keywords in a space of identifiers open to the user has a problem with evolution, If I allowed unprefixed identifiers now then any keyword I add later could invalidate old N3 documents. One possibility, rather clumsy, was for unprefixed names to be unavailable unless the document declares exactly which keywords it will use. @keywords a, has, which, of . x a rfd:Class. y a x. I don't want to move on this until I am happy that the outcome will be safe. Tim ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com> To: "Seth Russell" <seth@robustai.net> Cc: "RDF-IG" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>; "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org> Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2001 4:43 PM Subject: Re: Dropping the redundant colon in N3 > > i reread the primer quickly and I don't see anything about "keywords" > > Try: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3 > For example, you could have :x has :y of :z, which if you got rid of the > colons would be x has y of z. Actually, I don't like that, because what if > you had ":hasAuthor", then it doesn't make grammatical sense (e.g. "has > hasAuthor of", or even worse "is :hasAuthorOf of"); but TimBL said that is > optional (I suppose to make it a bit more legible to humans). I'd take 'em > out if it were up to me, and let the properties do the talking :-) > > > But your right, if the intent is to allow any key words whatsoever > > and just have the parser ignore them, and if that is more important > > than worrying about the messy redundancy, then the colon would > > be necessary. > > I think the colon is there due to the fact that it fits in neater with the > namespace spec. I wouldn't make much sense to have:- > > @prefix <URI> > > Because you would be expecting something to bind. Maybe if the ns alias > (prefix) to bind were in quotes, ala.:- > > @prefix "myprefix:" <URI> > > then you could have > > @prefix "" <URI> > > But it gets a bit messy. I don't know really, I think it's alright the way > it is. "Too many cooks spoil the broth", and all that :-) > > -- > Kindest Regards, > Sean B. Palmer > @prefix : <http://infomesh.net/2001/01/n3terms/#> . > [ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] has :homepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> . >
Received on Tuesday, 23 January 2001 17:45:43 UTC