Re: Summary of strings, markup, and language tagging in RDF (resend)

I'd like to bring a little framing to this discussion in the hope that
we can wrap this up by this week's RDFCore telecon on Friday.

>From my perspective RDFCore has moved beyond the point where it is
seeking to consider improved designs.  The time for that was before last
call.  We are now checking for problems with the current design and its
specification.

I have allowed (could I have stopped it:) some discussion of the merits
of proposal that Martin has made.  This gave an opportunity for the WG
to recognise the merits of that design and say to the chairs - we messed
up - this design is much better - please give us the time to incorporate
it.  That has not happened.

So, discussion of the form "here is a better design" is out of order at
this stage.  Such suggestions need to be made at an earlier stage in the
process.

So we must now consider whether i18n are pointing to significant flaws
in the present design.

If I have understood correctly, there are broadly two issues:

  a) a violation of an i18n design principle that there should be only
one way to represent text/markup with/without lang tags in RDF's
abstract syntax.

  b) that users will be surprised that xml:lang tags that are in scope
around a parseType='Literal' do not affect that literal.

I note that in

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2003Jun/0187.html

Martin suggests that issue b) is "easily the most important one".

Martin:  To address issue a) as you would like will require significant
changes to the RDFCore specs which RDFCore is not persuaded would be
beneficial at this time.  We could spend more time and energy on it, but
it seems to me that, given your statement of importance we should focus
our efforts on resolving issue b).

Do you agree?

Brian

Received on Tuesday, 1 July 2003 11:26:32 UTC