[oslc-core] OSLC Compact representation, titles with markup

Tue Aug 23 00:02:44 EDT 2011

Hi all,

I've been following this thread with interest, as it touches on some of the
more general confusion/discomfort I've been developing over the past
several weeks or months about the use of XMLLiteral with
rdf:parseType="Literal" for HTML content.

Adam's comments below are particularly interesting. In general, it's not
clear to me who benefits from the use of the unescaped literal
representation, or in what scenario. And that approach, then, requires the
use of the XMLLiteral type, which I also wonder about (as I'll explain
further). If there is some benefit that I don't know about, perhaps it
derails this whole line of thought. But if there isn't, could this be a
case of the concrete representation tail wagging the abstract syntax dog?

One thing that always struck me as odd was that rdf:parseType="Literal"
examples were the only ones I could find anywhere in OSLC that use typed
literals (the XMLLiteral type is implicit with this special RDF/XML
syntax). Moreover, I couldn't find any guidance in the specs about the use
of plain vs. typed literals at all. From the perspective of a client,
anyway, it would seem a very nice thing if a particular provider would use
a typed literal to tell you that a title, for example, should be treated as
a simple string or as HTML content. And that's the very thing that typed
literals do. It could be that the presence of an XMLLiteral type is
supposed to signal the use of XHTML content, and the absence of any type is
supposed to signal plain text. But I couldn't find that spelled out
anywhere -- if it is, perhaps it's hard to find, or perhaps I just did a
poor job of looking -- and I'd argue it would be better to include types in
both cases. [1]

It's this line of thinking that leads me to question the use of XMLLiteral
in the first place. I saw in some old discussions that the intention in
OSLC was not for XMLLiteral to imply XHTML necessarily. Using it for other
XML languages was considered and endorsed, in principle. But where does
that leave XHTML? With a type that doesn't really say what it is or what
you can do with it. We have specs that communicate the XHMTL intent in
words, but we also have a mechanism built into RDF that could communicate
this, and we're not really using it fully. Thus, I think it would be
preferable to define and use a type that specifically represents HTML. And
note, I suggest HTML, not XHTML, since using any type other than XMLLiteral
eliminates the "benefit" of the special rdf:parseType="Literal" syntax. And
without that, I don't see a particular benefit in the stricter XHTML
syntax.

One other possibility that I've considered, which Arthur suggested
previously, is using a namespace to identify that the XML is XHTML, in
particular, instead of doing it directly in the literal type. And I believe
that, strictly, the XHTML namespace is required for the elements to be
valid XHTML. But I found no hint of this in the spec or any examples, and
certainly RTC doesn't do this (I haven't checked other providers).
Moreover, I believe it's also a worse approach, since there's no guarantee
that your RDF runtime of choice will give you access to namespaces declared
on the property element (I don't believe Jena does), and detecting a
namespace inside the element content would require actually parsing the
value as XML. If all you want to do is pass markup along for display in a
browser, it would be unfortunate to have to actually parse the content to
determine that it's XHTML.

And this is where I close the loop on my thinking, by coming back to how a
consumer might actually want to make use of HTML content. Even outside of
the compact rendering scenario, ultimately it's probably going to get
displayed by a browser, whether as part of a larger Web page or in a
browser-backed widget in a rich client. And for that, HTML is probably just
as good as, if not better than, XHTML. Rather than worrying about whether
the content is well-formed XML, it's probably sufficient to just give it to
the browser and see what it can do with it. I would assert that "something
a browser can render" has been the working definition of HTML for a good
number of years now, while XHTML has largely faded in importance.

Going the other way, the appeal of HTML really shows. If a provider
natively deals with HTML (without concern for XML well-formedness), it
would be attractive to not have to convert that into XHTML to expose it via
OSLC. Likewise, a consumer may use a rich text control that yields HTML.
Generalized parsing of HTML for conversion to XHTML is non-trivial, and it
seems unfortunate to impose that conversion task onto everyone, just so
that we can use rdf:parseType="Literal" in RDF/XML and avoid applying
normal XML encoding to markup content (of course, some encoding will likely
be required for other RDF syntaxes anyway).

So, those are my thoughts on this (admittedly enlarged) topic. Even if they
all do make perfect sense (and I'm not necessarily claiming they do), I
realize we may be well past the point of being able to act on them. Still,
I thought I'd put them out there and see what others make of them.

Cheers,
Dave

[1] In fact, I think that the consistent use of typed literals in general
would be beneficial. You could even imagine exploiting them as a
compatibility measure, if it was decided that the type of a property needed
to change. This is a related, but separate, topic, which I'd be thrilled to
discuss further, but I don't want to open too many cans of worms at once.

[2] Or, perhaps, a less kind way of putting that is that the XHTML
namespace is required for the elements to

--
Dave Steinberg
IBM Rational Software
davidms at ca.ibm.com

  From:       Adam Archer/Toronto/IBM at IBMCA                                                                  

  To:         Arthur Ryman/Toronto/IBM at IBMCA                                                                 

  Cc:         "oslc-core at open-services.net" <oslc-core at open-services.net>, Randy Hudson                      
              <hudsonr at us.ibm.com>, oslc-core-bounces at open-services.net                                      

  Date:       08/22/2011 06:20 PM                                                                            

  Subject:    Re: [oslc-core] OSLC Compact representation, titles with markup                                

  Sent by:    oslc-core-bounces at open-services.net                                                            

The big concern to me is not the ability to process the RDF/XML with XPath,
it's the ability to do so in a browser environment. Currently all
implementations of all rich hovers in all Jazz based products encode any
html tags in their dcterms:title attributes (and doubly encode special
characters). For the consumer on the browser side, this means simply taking
the content of the attribute, decoding it (which browsers are very good at)
and slapping the result into the dom (which browsers are also very good
at).

The alternative would be a total consumability nightmare from the point of
view of a browser (which is the most important consumer of this entire
spec). If the tags are actually child nodes in the xml representation, it
means we will have child elements in the resulting document that we get
back from the xml http request which means we will have to traverse a dom
tree and recreate a structure which could easily be represented as an
escaped string, like everyone is doing today.

I realize that implementation is not supposed to lead the spec, but I don't
even think that would be the case here. The oslc compact spec grew
organically out of the old jazz compact rendering spec which can be found
here:

https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Sandbox/CompactRenderingV1P1

If we look at the semantic description of the dc:title and jp:abbreviation
it states explicitly that the content MUST be escaped:

> The HTML markup MUST be escaped; for example, "<b>" as "<b>".

This decision was made consciously for very well defined technical reasons
(discussed above) in the original spec. If that decision was reversed in
the creation of the OSLC compact spec then I believe that to have been a
huge mistake and would like to see the spec fixed rather than for all
providers to have to change how their compact documents are served and all
consumers to have to go to the trouble of walking the dom to determine what
the provider is actually trying to show.

Adam Archer
Jazz Developer
IBM Toronto Lab

From:        Arthur Ryman/Toronto/IBM
To:        Samuel Padgett <spadgett at us.ibm.com>
Cc:        Adam Archer/Toronto/IBM at IBMCA, Randy Hudson
<hudsonr at us.ibm.com>, "oslc-core at open-services.net"
<oslc-core at open-services.net>, oslc-core-bounces at open-services.net
Date:        08/22/2011 04:40 PM
Subject:        Re: [oslc-core] OSLC Compact representation, titles with
markup

Sam,

You wrote:

It's very difficult to parse the former using XPath. For instance, the
expression "/oslc:Compact/dcterms:title" takes out the "<s>" and "</s>"

I don't think problems using XPath are a valid reason to encode markup
since RDF/XML itselt is very difficult to process using XPath. At one point
we tried to define an OSLC-variant of RDF/XML that looked like "normal"
XML. However, we abandonned that and now require support for generic
RDF/XML.

The are many equivalent ways to represent a given set of triples in
RDF/XML. It would therefore be very problematic to use XPath, XSLT, or
XQuery to process RDF/XML. The safe way to process RDF/XML is to use an RDF
toolkit like Jena.

Regards,
___________________________________________________________________________

 Arthur Ryman                                                                   

 DE, PPM Chief Architect                                                        

 IBM Software, Rational                                                         

 Toronto Lab | +1-905-413-3077                   Twitter | Facebook | YouTube   

 From:    Samuel Padgett <spadgett at us.ibm.com>                             

 To:      "oslc-core at open-services.net" <oslc-core at open-services.net>      

 Cc:      Adam Archer/Toronto/IBM at IBMCA, Randy Hudson <hudsonr at us.ibm.com> 

 Date:    08/07/2011 01:01 PM                                              

 Subject: [oslc-core] OSLC Compact representation, titles with markup      

 Sent by: oslc-core-bounces at open-services.net                              

I believe the spec is a bit confusing when it comes to titles with markup
for UI Preview.

The Compact representation has a dcterms:title property. It's defined as an
XML Literal that can contain XHTML markup [1]. My understanding of XML
Literals as discussed in the RDF Primer [2] means a title with markup would
look like this,

 <dcterms:title>12345: <s>Null pointer exception during
startup</s></dcterms:title>

The example [3] of this resource has a title like this, however,

 <dcterms:title> 12345: <s>Null pointer exception during
startup</s> </dcterms:title>

The example doesn't seem to fit with the description.

It's very difficult to parse the former using XPath. For instance, the
expression "/oslc:Compact/dcterms:title" takes out the "<s>" and "</s>"
Most implementations I'm aware also follow the example where markup is
encoded. It means special characters need to be "double encoded." For
instance, "12345: Values > 1000 incorrectly calculated" would be,

 <dcterms:title>12345: Values &gt; 1000 incorrectly
calculated</dcterms:title>

I think we should add more clarity to the spec here, as getting this wrong
can open up consumers to cross-site scripting attacks. I'd also suggest we
say that providers MUST NOT use any markup with a <script> tag and consumer
MUST NOT display any markup with a <script> tag to guard against this
problem.

Best Regards,
Sam

[1]
http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/OslcCoreUiPreview?sortcol=table;up=#Representation_Compact

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax/#xmlliterals
[3]
http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/OslcCoreUiPreview?sortcol=table;up=#XML_Representation_Format

_______________________________________________
Oslc-Core mailing list
Oslc-Core at open-services.net
http://open-services.net/mailman/listinfo/oslc-core_open-services.net

_______________________________________________
Oslc-Core mailing list
Oslc-Core at open-services.net
http://open-services.net/mailman/listinfo/oslc-core_open-services.net

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://open-services.net/pipermail/oslc-core_open-services.net/attachments/20110823/42ed4e89/attachment-0003.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: graycol.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 105 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://open-services.net/pipermail/oslc-core_open-services.net/attachments/20110823/42ed4e89/attachment.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: ecblank.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 45 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://open-services.net/pipermail/oslc-core_open-services.net/attachments/20110823/42ed4e89/attachment-0001.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 19967617.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 360 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://open-services.net/pipermail/oslc-core_open-services.net/attachments/20110823/42ed4e89/attachment-0002.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 19394555.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 9590 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://open-services.net/pipermail/oslc-core_open-services.net/attachments/20110823/42ed4e89/attachment-0003.gif>