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RE: Semantic Web permathread, iteration n+1 (was Re:

• To: 'Elliotte Rusty Harold' <elharo@m...>, Michael Champion <mc@x...>
• Subject: RE: Semantic Web permathread, iteration n+1 (was Re: InfoWorld agrees with Elliote Rusty Harold)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2004 09:58:11 -0500
• Cc: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>

I agree with that.  Syntax is not trivial because it is habitual.

I also think, purely sociologically, that the zeitgeist is not 
ripe for another major change.  Even if the sebweb is positioned 
as just a completion of the current web, I don't sense a desire 
out here to take on yet another technology to do what we are 
doing with the current ones.  A developer made a remark to me 
a few days ago that stuck with me: "What I dislike is having 
to tell the customer that we almost have working what we had 
working five years ago."

I am thinking of Tim Bray's latest blog on web services.  We 
often do find that the thing we can do now that works is 
better than the thing we can do next year that is harder 
and more to learn to get only slightly better results.  I 
spent a few cycles making a Foxpro database generate 
ERDs in VML.  It's a stupid pet trick, but my customers 
are wild for it.  Now I can spend more cycles making it 
generate Visio, but so far, no one is asking for that. 
If they do, I will, but in the commercial world, it is 
usually best to wait until they do ask.  Who is asking 
for the Semantic Web?

len


From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...]

Part of what bothers me about the semantic web is syntax. It's too 
ugly to be practical. And syntax does matter. XML succeeded where 
SGML failed not because XML can do anything SGML can't (except maybe 
internationalization) but because the XML syntax story is cleaner and 
more approachable. The RDF syntax is just too ugly to be plausible.

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