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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 23:28:12 +0100
• In-reply-to: <16293.32552.657306.513020@g...>
• Organization: Dyomedea (http://dyomedea.com)
• References: <r02000200-1028-881B3A580D7B11D8A92B0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]> <1067808999.5888.120.camel@delleric> <16293.32552.657306.513020@g...>

On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 23:03, David Megginson wrote:
> Eric van der Vlist writes:
> 
>  > But each RDF application can choose to be also a XML application
>  > and define which variations are accepted through documentation and
>  > eventually schemas as we've done for RSS 1.0.
>  > 
>  > In that case, the number of variations are just more possibilities
>  > for the designers of the application which I think is an advantage
>  > rather than an issue.
> 
> Unfortunately, with n>1 RDF syntactic variants rather than one, it's
> much less likely that RDF can jump over the barrier into any kind of
> serious network effect.  We already tried that with SGML and the SGML
> declaration.

I am really wondering if the reason of the success of XML is really the
simplification over SGML as it has been written so many times. This
simplification has helped, but SGML (or any kind of other derived markup
language) would probably invaded the web anyway just because this was a
real need at that point in time.

As technician, I think we tend to overestimate the technical factors
which are important but are governed by other factors.

> RDF's flexible syntax is well-designed for embedding in Web pages, but
> unfortunately, it turns out that almost no one wants to do that.  The
> syntax is also well-designed for fitting into other types of XML
> markup, but it turns out that almost no one wants to do that, either.
> 
> As a result, it might be fair to conclude that RDF's syntactic
> flexibility was a kind of premature optimization, a lot of work to
> accomodate premature requirements.

Isn't the question rather to know if there is a real need for RDF in
which case it will be used even if it is not perfect? If there is no
real need, RDF may still be used by some people (I do use it) but would
remain marginal even if it was perfect...

Eric

-- 
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                       http://xmlfr.org/index/person/eric+van+der+vlist/
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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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