Re: ISSUE 5.6 - daml:imports as magic syntax

On Mon, 2002-09-09 at 19:40, Jonathan Borden wrote:
> 
> Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> >
> > A treatment of imports can be done completely syntactically, by replacing
> > imports foo, where foo is a URI (or whatever) by the contents of the
> > document pointed at by foo.   This is the way I would handle it in the
> > abstract syntax and direct semantics.
> 
> hmmm... if we consider that daml:imports is syntactic sugar for XInclude
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/ i.e.
> 
> <xi:include
>     xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
>     href="foo.daml"
> />
> 
> just using XInclude as it is already specified would allow us to prune this
> whole discussion and the issues it raises of special syntax, semantics etc.

Not a bad idea...

XInclude wouldn't come for free (the RDF/XML spec doesn't say that
RDF parsers must grok XInclude) but if we're interested in special
syntax for syntactic inclusion, I'd prefer XInclude syntax, which
is designed for exactly that purpose, rather than daml:imports,
which sorta looks like an RDF property but it's sorta unclear
how to specify that it acts like one.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Tuesday, 10 September 2002 12:28:24 UTC