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Re: RDF syntax

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: RDF syntax
• From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2003 23:16:02 +0100
• In-reply-to: <r02000200-1028-4A493EE40D7E11D8A92B0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• Organization: Dyomedea (http://dyomedea.com)
• References: <r02000200-1028-4A493EE40D7E11D8A92B0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 22:48, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> Unfortunately, there are too many people out there who take RDF's syntax
> liberalism as permission for them to do whatever rather than as an
> opportunity for them to customize the syntax so it makes sense in XML
> terms. 
> 
> I don't find Bill Kearney's exuberant use of RDF structures to be
> unusual or anomalous.  Given his priorities, it makes sense.  It just
> doesn't mesh well with XML practice.
> 
> RDF serialization, just sort of happens, you know?

Then the XML users are probably not the target audience of these
applications!

We are in the same situation with XML/RDF that we are with text/XML: I
could choose to write a XML application which is "raw text friendly" by
defining a specific serialisation and eventually publishing a regexp to
validate my documents. By doing so I would give access to this
application to programmers and tools both at the text and at the XML
level but I would loose some of the flexibility of XML. If I don't do
so, I forbid the access to raw text tools unless they are ready to cope
with the complexity of XML.

RDF applications have the same choice to do: either restrict their
syntactical variations and loose some of their flexibility or forbid the
access to XML tools unless these are ready to cope with the complexity
of RDF syntax.

When they don't want to loose the flexibility of a full RDF layer
access, they should just be honest enough to advert themselves as "pure
RDF applications" and not take any XML label, just as most of the XML
applications have rejected the label "raw text application". 

I don't see this as an issue we can fully fix, but as a price to pay
when we pile specs on top of each other: each layer needs to have its
own set of tools and mixing different layers requires some
compromises...

I think your reaction toward the RDF serialisation is very coherent with
your quest of the perfect XML processing model which would keep all the
properties of the text document behind the XML tags :-) !

Both are noble quests worth pursuing, but I don't think they can be
fully met since they are kind of denying that structures in layers
require a price to pay! 

Of course we should still try to minimise this price...

My 0.02 Euros.

Eric
-- 
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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