Re: A certain difficulty

On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Greg FitzPatrick wrote:

> Despite who or what is stupid, I guess I am not as brave as the
> kid who called the king naked, in saying that the syntax and model
> specifications are not the documents they should be

Too late!  You just did.  Bravo!:)

> if we are going to win converts to the RDF cause.

RDF concepts aren't bad at all...

> That this group of engineers made a sincere effort to implement
> RDF and failed, is saddening

The basic problem with RDF (actually the specs) is the XML part.  
This was always a how-do-we-get-there-from-here problem.  RDF has a
pretty detailed data model.  It might have sufficed - as I believe at
one point it did - to consider XML as just one possible serialization
syntax.  Most of the complications come from trying to shoehorn
everything into XML, with added "constraints" like "it's gotta work in
Netploder" - "work", of course, meaning "gets ignored".  This led to
suboptimal decisions such as redeploying the HTML-inspired idea of
sticking a URL (a resource reference) into an attribute.

Unfortunately, I don't think it can be cleaned up.  People are likely
to "get" RDF and then curse the syntax for making that process so
difficult.


Arjun