[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: XML is boring (was Re: coming clean with the SGML crowd)

• From: "Mark D. Anderson" <mda@d...>
• To: "Ron Bourret" <rbourret@d...>, <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 09:09:27 -0700

>It strikes me that the application that is going to make the public sit up and 
>notice XML is the one that lets me ask: "Make a table of all hotels in New York 
>that cost less than $100 and are within walking distance of Central Park."
>
>The good news is that this application is completely possible (and almost, but 
>not quite, inevitable).  The bad news is that it's still a ways off.  What it 
>requires is enough people writing their Web documents in XML (with widely 
>accepted element tag names) to make it worthwhile for the search engines to 
>offer this kind of functionality.

I would think it also requires a query protocol, for use directly by
a UA, or proxy'd by a search engine (or network of engines,
using referals). Current web search is based on document retrieval,
which is increasingly unrealistic as content becomes dynamic: 
no search engine can index Microsoft's knowledge base, can they?
(And there are many other cases where there isn't even an underlying
set of documents.)

The only proposal I've seen for such a protocol is DASL, which is specific
to WEBDAV. Is there anything in the works for RDF or XML? Of course, such a spec
presumes consolidation of a metadata format (XSchema or whatever).

-mda




xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i...
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XML is boring (was Re: coming clean with the SGML crowd)
    • From: Andrew Bunner <bunner@m...>

• Prev by Date: Re: XML is boring (was Re: coming clean with the SGML crowd)
• Next by Date: Combining DTDs
• Previous by thread: Re: Combining DTDs
• Next by thread: Re: XML is boring (was Re: coming clean with the SGML crowd)
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread