[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Something altogether different?
On 4/22/05, Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...> wrote: > 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? It looks like these questions are answered in http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/04/22/bosworth.html As I understand the argument: The problem with XML is that it isn't a single simple sloppy syntax such as HTML is, it's a metaformat that one can use to define many nice clean formats. Since everyone can hard-code their knowledge of HTML (or RSS), they don't have to deal with XML's meta-ness and can just get down to business. So, I guess he's not talking about RSS as a metadata format to describe data, but turning actual data inside out to fit it into the conceptual model of RSS. Presumably the web would consist of documents in HTML and data in this RSS-like format. That would let us query data using Google's not-a-query-language rather than forcing us to use XQuery or SQL. We wouldn't have to worry about schemas, or nasty joins, because everything would have the same (basic) schema and be in flat collections that didn't have to be joined. This may play into the microformats idea, which I understand to mean constraining existing generic formats with conventions for how to address a specific domain. Contrast that wil the XML Way of defining a specific syntax for each domain using the XML metalanguage. I don't know what to say without sounding like Ted Nelson critiquing the Web :-) I can turn my brain inside out and see how the Web might evolve this way to accomodate data more pragmatically than it does now. I can also see this turning the 'Net into an even worse sewer of spam and malware than it is now, for roughly the reasons that Ken North talks about earlier in this thread. I dunno ... I can't say this vision appeals to me, but I can see the momentum for RSS and microformats converging to produce this kind of thing more easily than I can envision the Semantic Web, or WS-* creating a worlwide services network, or XQuery as a way of integrated XML views of diversely structured data on the web. The world would probably be a better place if one or more of these came into being rather than the Web of Data, but the world being the way it is, I guess Bosworth's vision is a lot more likely to evolve, at least if you buy Shirky's analysis in http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html I don't have any trouble believing that schemas, XQuery, WS-*, maybe even formal ontologies have a place in business and government intranets, and the B2B world, and other places where orderliness has a real payoff and rules can be enforced. But somebody PLEASE talk me out of thinking that Gresham's Law makes Bosworth's vision all too plausible for the Web itself: "bad" sloppy, simple but useful data driving out "good" data that requires schemas or queries that are hard to define and users that know the rules. Jonathan, you started this, what do you think: ... will the XQuery paradigm or the Web of Data paradigm prevail, or will they co-exist? [By the XQuery paradigm I mean lots of diversely structured data integrated by queries on an XML data model view that abstracts away the messy details ; by the Web of Data paradigm I mean data messily stuffed into a generic schema, with simple queries on the well-known structure].
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