Re: Why not XHTML+RDF? was Re: Links are links

Paul Prescod wrote:

>
> In *my* markup language it is my perogative to weigh the costs and
> benefits of elements vs. attributes for myself. My choice should not be
> constrained by XLink or RDF M&S.
>

Certainly, and *your* applications will perfectly understand the semantics
of *your* markup language. I'm not sure that I want to bother figuring all
this out, nothing personal, and particularly for standard languages, I'd
very much like to use standard mechanisms, standard software modules, etc.
to express relatively standard uses of things like URIs. I am willing to
accept less than optimal syntax (for any particular language) in order to
gain software and cognitive reuse across many languages and their associated
applications.

Sort of like how most folks have decided to code in high level languages
rather than machine code. Frequently it is possible to improve performance,
decrease memory footprint etc, by hand optimizing machine code, but at what
cost? I had thought that the general idea of using XML was to allow
application programmers to focus on semantics as encoded in software, rather
than syntactic issues, parsers etc. etc. Generally it is possible to take
_any_ XML language and further optimize it (perhaps in terms of
characters/document etc.) by rewriting it in SGML e.g. using tag
minimization etc. or s-expressions, or whatever other custom syntax... but I
thought we were trying to get -beyond- such arguments (e.g. parens vs. angle
brakets)

Jonathan

http://www.openhealth.org
http://www.jonathanborden-md.com
http://www.erieneuroscience.org


Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 2 October 2002 18:04:13 UTC