ISSUE-40: Empty elements should not create literals

no triples for empty elements

Empty elements should not create literals

State:

CLOSED

Product:

RDFa 1.1 Core

Raised by:

Manu Sporny

Opened on:

2010-08-05

Description:

From Richard Cyganiak:

<div about="#person">
<dt>Job title</dt>
<dd class="job" property="jobtitle"></dd>
</div>

After RDFa parsing, the following RDF triple is generated from this snippet (assuming a term mapping for jobtitle):

<#person> ex:jobtitle "" .

I ask that the parsing algorithm be changed so that no triple is generated in the case where an element has a @property attribute, no @content attribute, and no text content.

The motivation for this change: Template-generated HTML often contains empty elements like in the example above. This happens when a field is not present in a given record. Generating an empty <td/> or <span/> is often less effort than suppressing the generation of the element altogether, so thats' what template authors often do. When a zero-length element carrying @property is encountered, then it's almost certain that the author's intention was *not* to generate a zero-length literal, so the parsing algorithm should reflect that.

Related Actions Items:

No related actions

Related emails:

1. Re: (late) agenda for meeting, 2010-09-30 (from mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com on 2010-09-30)
2. (late) agenda for meeting, 2010-09-30 (from ivan@w3.org on 2010-09-30)
3. Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from ivan@w3.org on 2010-09-06)
4. Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from nathan@webr3.org on 2010-09-06)
5. Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from sebastian.heath@gmail.com on 2010-09-05)
6. Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from nathan@webr3.org on 2010-09-05)
7. Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from richard@cyganiak.de on 2010-09-05)
8. Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from nathan@webr3.org on 2010-09-05)
9. Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from richard.cyganiak@deri.org on 2010-09-05)
10. Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from sebastian.heath@gmail.com on 2010-09-05)
11. PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-40: no triples for empty elements (from msporny@digitalbazaar.com on 2010-09-05)
12. Re: ISSUE-40 Comment on RDFa 1.1 Core: Empty elements should not create literals (from shane@aptest.com on 2010-08-05)
13. ISSUE-40 (no triples for empty elements): Empty elements should not create literals [RDFa 1.1 Core] (from sysbot+tracker@w3.org on 2010-08-05)

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