Re: LANG: Moving issues 5.6 and 5.14 forward

Jim Hendler wrote:
> 
> this make sense to me, but I would like to point out that it is
> actually illegal RDF.  The problem is that the RDF syntax requires a
> root element of <RDF:rdf>  - further, at the current time, the
> RDF:rdf cannot can contain any attributes other than those of XML.
> There has been some discussion of possible ways to do something about
> this at the RDF level, but nothing definite.
>   -JH
> 

Actually, I just checked RDFM&S, and this is perfectly legal. RDF was
designed so you could embed it in other XML documents. I quote from
section 2.2.1 of [1]:

"The RDF element is a simple wrapper that marks the boundaries in an XML
document between which the content is explicitly intended to be mappable
into an RDF data model instance. The RDF element is optional if the
content can be known to be RDF from the application context."

Therefore, we can insert the RDF anywhere in another XML document.
Furthermore, if the application can determine that some content is RDF,
we don't even need to use the RDF tag. However, for the benefit of
plain-old-RDF parsers, I recommend that we keep it.

Jeff

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 15:23:12 UTC