[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Something altogether different?
On 4/22/05, Razvan MIHAIU <mihaiu@m...> wrote: > > To be honest I do not understand what this article propagating. What > is the revolutionary thing ? If somebody has time, I ask him to drop me > a line or two about this. My question to anyone who attended: Why is the "simple single wire format for data" based on RSS/Atom rather than XML itself? Also, he keeps talking about a "web for data", but doesn't he mean what we usually call metadata? I kinda sortof get the impression from the presentation and the various blogs I've seen about this that he's suggesting that we stuff our metadata into the simple, constrained RSS/Atom conceptual model (ontology?), then use RSS metaphors such as subscribing to channels and filtering entries to find what we want. The alternatives of trying to query raw XML with XQuery, or trying to define generalized metadata ontologies with RDF/OWL seem to have been rejected, but it's not clear why. Perhaps because they are too complex? But he seems to be focused on simple as in "easy for the user, with the implementation details hidden away", so it's not clear that these are any more complex as infrastructure components than, say, what Google does. Maybe by not using the metadata word he keeps us from thinking about the obvious problem with metadata on the Web, which is that it didn't work in the HTML META tag. We know the hypothesis from everyone's least favorite article about metadata: people lie, people are lazy, people are stupid, people aren't self-aware, useful taxonomies are really really hard to standardize ... and spammers and assorted slimeballs take advantage of those unpleasant facts to bamboozle the unwary. Assuming that is an at least partially correct explanation for the failure of the META tag (and, ahem, the rise of Google by figuring out how to ignore it), how will some RSS-like simple single wire format for (meta)data avoid that fate?
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