[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Some questions
Tim Bray <tbray@t...> writes: > And here is my attempt to explain why RDF hasn't been more successful: > > The syntax is hideously ugly and hard to understand, and the spec worries > so hard about being correct and complete that it is pretty well 100% > incomprehensible to ordinary people. > > I probably just hurt some feelings, but I've already shouted this in private > enough times that it won't be a surprise. I think Tim has shouted it in public as well. It's a shame, because RDF is very nice for exchanging object-oriented information among loosely-coupled systems, and there's some good Perl and Java support for it already available (I'm sure the Python people will get in there quickly). The problem is that the RDF-Syntax spec confounds even its bravest readers by trying to do two things at once: a) define a model and syntax for exchanging object-oriented information in XML; and b) apply the model and syntax to the problem domain of representing knowledge about Web pages. Neither of those two things is brain-dead simple, but either alone could have been presented clearly and straight-forwardly to an intelligent reader who knew the domain. Let this be a warning to us all to write our specs in clean, simple layers. > In my opinion RDF needs some serious sugar-coating and tutorializing > if it is ever going to achieve its potential. And lots of software. > I think its potential is huge, dwarfing that of XML. -Tim Agreed. XML is just syntax, and as Tim (I think) has said, syntax is boring: XML simply represents a low-level syntactic layer that we all had to agree on and get out of the way so that we could move on to the tasty stuff. XML was never supposed to be the point of the whole exercise, any more than IP or TCP was supposed to be the point of the Internet or the Web. RDF is much closer to that tasty stuff. The ability to exchange object-oriented information seemlessly among heterogenous systems is very, very exciting -- it's something that CORBA promised and failed to deliver outside the enterprise, and now RDF (and XML) can take a shot at it. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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