[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: CSS syntax for RDF
Hi Micah, Micah said: Only RDF/XML. RDF itself is quite nice. And powerful. Now, the purpose in an experiment like "CSS syntax for RDF" is not necessarily to produce something that can breeze through a CSS3 engine in a browser, but to leverage a familiar syntax and developer experience. The easier it is to produce metadata, the more it will get produced. The more metadata there is, the better. I'd like to expand this experiment, if I have time. Didier replies: If you do a research on MCF or MCL you'll find something about the first incarnation of the RDF syntax which were, by the way very similar to css. Guha and me worked on that version. As you know an RDF object is a frame (based on AI frames) and a frame contains properties. In those days (At Apple research labs) we called each RDF object a unit. A unit would be defined as follow: Unit: (the unit identifier here) name: value name: value Etc... Quite easy no? Moreover, an HTTP transaction could be treated as an RDF frame so would be an SMTP transaction. Obviously the first line (an HTTP or SMTP verb) could not be treated as an RDF frame member but all the other name:value pairs could be. The main advantage we thought of at that moment (I am talking here of very old times, something like 1996!! Gee we were young and fool and... :-) was that a transaction (SMTP or HTTP) cold carry meta information about the transported document. IN fact, in some ways, when an HTTP header tells us that the contained document is of a particular MIME type, this header is providing some meta information about the contained information. When Guha was still working for Apple (before Netspace) he did a viewer named Project X (the code name for this project at Apple Research). The viewer let you see a constellation of information units as you can do today with (but was less fancy than) The Brain applet. On my side I did a Microsoft Window shell extension that allowed you to see a hierarchy of web information units on your desktop. I remember that before the XMLification of MCF (happening when Apple research become history and Guha moved to Netscape) we were working on associations between information units, something like the topic map "associations". Implicitly, information units where hierarchical. For instance, an information unit defined in a file would point to an other one contained in another file. That way you could navigate from information unit clusters to information unit clusters. We soon discovered from our zealot supporters that new relations between topic would be a nice feature. During the Project X experiment and since Apple zealots, like always, where very supportive of this project, we got several site supporting the MCF format. This allowed you to navigate from site to site or from topics to topics inside the Project X viewer or the desktop Windows Explorer extension. Now back to the present. With the RDF based RSS you get somewhat this except that the RSS files are not linked together as where the MCF files. With MCF I could publish my own mini web or my personal version of the web. MCF was based on the notion of linkage (at least the latest version). This is unfortunate that I do not see that kind of things now. RSS and most RDF based system are still seeing the world as flatlands, we need a Christopher Columbus to show us that flatlands are a subset of a rounded universe. Or maybe I should say, since we already got the Columbus, that we need an Americano Vespucci with good political skills to give a name to discovered lands and status to previous discoveries :-) Cheers Didier PH Martin http://didier-martin.com Note: for those not knowing what a frame is, think of it as a kind of free form record. No needs to define a schema of what will be contained in the record, just add properties/values about a particular object. The notion of frame came out of two sources : - lisp allowing free form lists - knowledge bases simulating a real world view about a limited set of object and their associated properties.
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