Re: A real problem with CURIEs and a proposal

In general: yes, it would be way better. I think it was a huge mistake to choose the ':' character.... many many years ago. But, as of today, the only spec that has chosen this is CSS which uses, afaik, the '|' character; all other specs, eg, around RDF, use the ':' character and I am afraid we will have to live with this original sin. Changing that in RDFa unilaterally would create way more confusion in my view, let alone the fact that it would completely screw up compatibility with RDFa 1.0...

Ivan



On Jan 24, 2012, at 13:15 , Simon Grant wrote:

> For a long-term (not short-term!) solution, wouldn't it be so much easier for everyone to understand, particularly the less technically knowledgeable, if the character used to separate a prefix from the rest of a "CURIE" (or similar) was NOT ":" but something else instead? While this character remains the same as the one used in existing IRIs, and with namespaces, many people are going to remain confused.
> 
> Yes, I am slightly aware of the huge ramifications of this, but then I'm not suggesting it as a short-term or easy solution, just a good one, eventually.
> 
> Simon 
> 
> 2012/1/24 Niklas Lindström <lindstream@gmail.com>
> Hello,
> 
> I've been investigating some of the minute details and issues
> surrounding CURIEs, based on the discussion that recently cropped up
> with ISSUE-125 [1].
> 
> It seems to me that the definition we currently have is flawed in one
> more way, and quite crucially so.
> [...]


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Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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