Re: white space in xsd:hexBinary

On 16 Jan 2012, at 21:00, Liam R E Quin wrote:

> On Mon, 2012-01-16 at 20:41 +0100, Henry Story wrote:
>> On 16 Jan 2012, at 20:20, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> 
>> Ah that's a pitty. 
>> 
>> Still if one could find out what the reasons might be, and if none
>> were found to be that serious, one could perhaps have more lenient
>> parsers get rid of those whitespaces in the context of RDF/XML.
> 
> If you're going to use XML and Schema, use them, don't invent
> incompatibilities - any more than I could call it RDF if I allowed
> interchange of pairs and fours and not just triples.

I was not trying to invent incompatibilities. Just trying to
 1) use only well defined standards as far as possible so as to minimise re-invention.
    In RDF xsd:hexBinary is used, so I wanted to use that.
 2) try to understand how one can respond to potential format errors by publishers

> 
> Two other workarounds may be possible, I don't know -
> (1) define your own type, and in XSD derive it from xs:string with a
> constraining facet

yes, in fact that is how I started off. I defined cert:hex

 http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/cert#hex 

because it seemed to me that we should have more human readable/writeable format, as WebID is something that is going to be determining people's identity 

But then doing things like that meant for example loosing some support that one could gain from tools such as SPARQL. It especially seemed to make it possible to have some very nice and concise SPARQL query as shown here:

   http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/#verifying-the-webid-claim

So I know that xsd:hexBinary is not perfect, but well it had advantages even being so restrictive because it is a standard. And when standards work nicely together it is a real pleasure.

> 
> (2) use (in XSD) a list of hexBinary values - then whitespace is allowed
> between them - and recombine at the application level.

Here is my question to your group. How is an xsd:hexBinary with a white space
meant to be interpreted currently?
> 
> In XSD, hexBinary is representing a base16 number in a similar way that
> decimal represents a base10 number; decimal numbers also cannot contain
> spaces, even though that's standard practice in some parts of the world
> (e.g "30 000 000").

yes, those are usually smaller numbers. 

> 
> Liam
> 
> -- 
> Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
> Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Monday, 16 January 2012 20:37:57 UTC