Re: missing bit of RDF for XML people

Dave Viner wrote:
> Coming from an XML-ish background, I found another example quite useful in
> illuminating the differences between RDF and XML.  I can't remember exactly
> where this came from... but it's along these lines:
> 
> Imagine this XML:
> 
> <country>
> 	Canada
> 	<city>Montréal</city>
> 	<city>Toronto</city>
> 	<city>Vancouver</city>
> </country>
> 
> If a person looks at it, you can clearly see the meaning.  Canada is a
> country, Montreal is a city in Canada.
> Now imagine this XML
> 
> <xxx>
> 	Canada
> 	<yyy>Montréal</yyy>
> 	<yyy>Toronto</yyy>
> 	<yyy>Vancouver</yyy>
> </xxx>
> 
> What is the relationship between Toronto and Canada?  What exactly is Canada
> according to this XML?  
> Although the element name "country" is meaningful to a person, there's no
> explicit meaning to a SAX parser (for example).
>  
> Don't know if this would help others, but I found it useful.

A perfect example of how "unobvious" XML can be, is an apple plist file 
(which is XML, very ugly XML) but with the elements translated in 
chinese... would be a puzzle for most people to figure out how things 
are related to one another.

-- 
Stefano.