ISSUE-69: Handling of fragment identifiers in RDF Concepts

fragments

Handling of fragment identifiers in RDF Concepts

State:

CLOSED

Product:

RDF Concepts

Raised by:

Richard Cyganiak

Opened on:

2011-07-21

Description:

This is part of the effort of making RDF Concepts independent from a particular serialization format (RDF/XML).

The RDF Concepts section on “Fragment Identifiers” treats the RDF/XML media type as canonical for establishing the referent of IRIs that include fragment identifier. But today we have many different media types that can carry RDF graphs, and HTTP content negotiation is more common, so this treatment doesn't work anymore.

Also, the problem addressed in the section (context-dependence of fragment identifiers) has to some extent gone away when RFC 2396 was replaced by RFC 3986. The latter states that the same fragment should be used for the same thing in resources that have multiple representations (Section 3.5).

So it might be sufficient to:

1. state that IRIs with fragIDs in RDF graphs can name things external to the graph
2. point to RFC 3986, Section 3.5
3. point out that fragIDs in RDF should be used in a way that's consistent with non-RDF representations; for example, if #foo is a document section in an HTML representation, then it should be treated as naming that document section in any RDF statements; but if #bar is undefined in an HTML representation, then it could name anything in an RDF graph.

This would also answer ISSUE-37.

Related Actions Items:

No related actions

Related emails:

1. Re: Proposal: Strike section “Fragment Identifiers” from RDF Concepts (from richard@cyganiak.de on 2011-11-10)
2. Re: Proposal: Strike section “Fragment Identifiers” from RDF Concepts (from jeremy@topquadrant.com on 2011-11-09)
3. Proposal: Strike section “Fragment Identifiers” from RDF Concepts (from richard@cyganiak.de on 2011-11-09)
4. RDF-ISSUE-69 (fragments): Handling of fragment identifiers in RDF Concepts (from sysbot+tracker@w3.org on 2011-07-21)

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