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
  

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2000 12:05:05 UTC