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[Once again, Liam's message doesn't appear to have reached the list.] Liam Quin writes: > On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 03:43:04PM -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote: > [...] > > > While I appreciate the need to do more than HTML 1.0, I also think > it's > > pretty obvious that a much wider segment of the world is happy with > > href, src, and longdesc than is interested in either complex links or > > RDF. > > True. Well, RDf is a mechanism for representing metadata, something > most people aren't interested in to begin with. Of course, most > people haven't made a 'phone call yet, either :-) > > > Allowing href on everything - whether or not it has the unnecessary > > xlink: namespace slapped on it - is a much larger advance in making > > hypertext broadly useful than any attempt to rewrite XHTML to take > > advantage of complex links. > > Agreed. > > I think a useful way to think of RDF is not that it, as a whole, is > something anyone wants, but rather that it provides a framework in > which a whole bunch of people cna do stuff they want and need to do, > and have the result be interoperable, so the same tools work on all > the data and the same data works in all the tools. > > Simple markup that happens to conform to the RDF rec, but is useful > in its own right and easy to understand, has a whole bunch of > benefits. > > I'm not sure if that has much to do with XLink and 80/20 though. I was just citing RDF as a technology which I think offers an even more complicated but more powerful set of linking tools (in its typical XML form, at any rate), and as something which I suspect misses the 80/20 point for most HTML developers currently. There's kind of a continuum from simple usage to elegant abstraction: ---- HTML ------- XLink ----- RDF ---- Depending on the application, one or more of these may fit your needs, but a lot of people (myself included) tend to loiter on the left-hand side of that continuum, seeing little benefit relative to the costs imposed by moving to the right. ------------- Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA http://simonstl.com may be my URI http://monasticxml.com may be my ascetic URI urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether
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