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

RE: RDF and the new releases

• To: 'Tim Bray' <tbray@t...>, Shelley Powers <shelleyp@b...>
• Subject: RE: RDF and the new releases
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 15:24:13 -0600
• Cc: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, xml-dev@l...

You are almost right, Tim.

HTML was "bad" in that it created a growing 
problem of support and extensibility.  IOW, 
it was easy to apply messily and that meant 
the tag stacker implementor had to support 
what amounted to tag soup.  XML came along 
to provide a means to create new markup 
applications but also was touted as a
means to clean up that mess. 

Success depends on perspective.   If all 
one cares about is getting users started and don't mind 
creating a wildfire of maintenance issues, 
that's one approach.  Success here was 
colonization.   Try that in your swimming 
pool and learn to love the smell of chlorine.

The other approach is to simplify as you 
suggest, but keep in mind that different 
eyeballs will have different needs, so 
that 80/20 point may require more coordinates 
to locate in real space.

1.  Simple
2.  Maintainable
3.  Extensible
4.  Compatible

First rule of backfires: don't start the fire 
until you check the water supply and the precise 
current position of your teams.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...]

???? HTML was by no means "bad".  It was exactly what the world needed, 
and millions of people started using it because they liked it and 
because they could do "view source" and figure it out.  My gripe with 
RDF/XML is precisely that it's failing to learn this lesson from HTML's 
success.  Thus not enough people are using it, even though it's arguably 
what they need.

• Prev by Date: Re: RDF and the new releases
• Next by Date: RE: RDF and the new releases
• Previous by thread: Re: RDF and the new releases
• Next by thread: RE: RDF and the new releases
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread