Re: Caveats for Web-friendly service description

On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 20:21 +0100, Leigh Dodds wrote:
> Tim Bray wrote:
> > On Jun 1, 2005, at 7:48 AM, Leigh Dodds wrote:
> > 
> >> Can I suggest that a requirement for a service description format
> >> ought to allow for both RDF and XML as representation formats?
> > 
> > Why?  The cost of supporting two completely incompatible  representation 
> > formats is high, so the corresponding benefit would  have to be high 
> > too. -Tim
> 
>  From the opening list message [1]: "this mailing list is dedicated to
> discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and HTTP, and
> aligned with the Web and REST Architecture."
> 
> This is inclusive of all REST style services no matter what kind of 
> representations they return.

Correct, but note that it's about languages in general, i.e. it does not
preclude to have only one. I would agree with Tim here and be worried
about the cost of trying to do so. We already excluded SOAP messages for
example.

There is also a different cost in simply supporting "application/rdf
+xml" or supporting a complete mapping RDF<->Object.

So, I wouldn't sign a requirement to allow for both RDF and XML without
ensuring that we are not going to increase the cost by a factor of 10.
Look at it the other way around: if you were to describe a description
language/ontology for RDF services and I would come up with a
requirement to support plain XML as well, would you accept it that
easily?

Philippe