Re: RDFa + RDF/XML Considered Harmful? (was RE: Ordnance Survey data as Linked Data)

On 15 Jul 2008, at 13:05, Mark Birbeck wrote:

>
> Hi Bijan,
>
>> One funny aspect of RDF/XML, as I understand the history, is that  
>> some of
>> the quirkier aspects of its design stemmed from the goal of being  
>> embedable
>> in HTML (hence all the alternative forms) in a legacy browser  
>> compatible
>> way.
>
> That's interesting, I'd not heard that.

Dave mentions it in:
	http://www.dajobe.org/2003/05/iswc/paper.html

Of course, as I wrote to Taylor, a reason for having text or xml as  
element content is to allow fall back on literals (hence not *only*  
attributes for properties).

> I did think though, that one of the things about the RDF/XML structure
> was an attempt to enable many XML layouts to be interpreted as RDF.
> But obviously that's enormously difficult.
[snip]

I don't think this was a design goal at the time. The idea that RDF/ 
XML might be made to "look like" XML stems, afaik, from the great RSS  
1.0 debates and was applied to WSDL by Uche:
	http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-rdf/
but didn't get much further.

GRDDL is sorta a resurgence of that idea ;)

Cheers,
Bijan "Sad to have become a Grand Ole Fart of RDF/XML" Parsia.