Re: FragIds in semantic web (ACTION-543)

I certainly agree that having widely deployed formats using fragids without 
the corresponding media type registrations saying anything give some 
evidence that the community isn't bought into the importance of grounding 
the fragid semantics in the registration.

Just to see where it leads, let me try to argue that your statement about 
this practice being "independent of what 3986 says" is a bit too strong. 
RFC 3986 says:

"The semantics of a fragment identifier are defined by the set of 
representations that might result from a retrieval action on the primary 
resource.  The fragment's format and resolution is therefore dependent on 
the media type [RFC2046] of a potentially retrieved representation,"

This phrasing is a bit vague on whether such semantics must be >documented< 
in the media type registration (which certainly seems like good practice in 
any case), or whether the semantics are just a function of the media type 
used. Read narrowly, I think RFC 3986 says the latter.

So, an N3 advocate might argue: yes, absolutely, the interpretation of 
fragment IDs is >dependent< on the use of text/n3.  The lack of 
documentation for such semantics in the text/n3 registration may or may not 
be unfortunate, but that's no evidence that 3986 is being ignored.

Noah

On 5/6/2011 6:53 PM, Jonathan Rees wrote:
> For what it's worth - and backing up your point that RDF seems to be
> doing its own thing with fragids independent of what 3986 says - of
> the many RDF serialization format registrations either completed or in
> progress, the only one that says anything about fragids is
> application/rdf+xml (RFC 3870).
>
> Turtle and N3 are registered:
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/turtle
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/n3
> but say nothing about fragids.
>
> OWL Manchester, Functional, and XML are submitted and in progress, and
> say nothing. And of course, as I said, text/html and application/xml
> also say nothing.
>
> This state of affairs reinforces the RDFa view that updating the
> registrations is either unnecessary or unimportant. If Turtle doesn't
> do it, why should RDFa do it? (ACTION-509) Maybe this is right, I
> don't know.
>
> If we end up deciding this is important, we might consider updating
> the W3C guide on registering media types
> http://www.w3.org/2002/06/registering-mediatype
> to urge consideration of fragids, since this document is very likely
> what the authors of all the above registrations consulted. That
> doesn't solve the problem in general, but it would be a start.
>
> (thanks for help from Eric P, Ivan H, and Sandro H)
>
> Jonathan
>
>

Received on Saturday, 7 May 2011 04:14:09 UTC