RE: Core Vocabulary diagram might be confusing

On 3 Sep 2014 at 23:45, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
>>> I just got another mail about the perceived complexity;
>> 
>> Could you please forward that mail to the list (of course only if the
sender
>> is OK with it)?
> 
> [translated:]
> 
> ".to turn it into a success, I think you need to make it very accessible
> for RDF-agnostic people (i.e., a bit like JSON-LD did;
> it's JSON on the outside, RDF on the inside).
> This day, I cannot sell Hydra to [my company],
> they perceive it as being too complex.
> For the time being, we use HAL with lots of 'assumptions' [.].
> Not ideal I think, but well."

Thanks Ruben.


> Especially note "perceive" above.

Yep


>>> it would be great if we could start simple, and continue from there.
>>> Maybe even a primer would help.
>> 
>> Let's try to write the spec in a way which makes a primer unnecessary.
> 
> The way to do this would be to have the most crucial information on the
top.
> However, this still doesn't change the fact that complex information will
be below;
> so if people look at the spec as a whole, it can still be perceived as
complex.
> Perception is really important there.

I partly agree. The first impression needs to be "well, this looks
reasonably familiar, let's have a look". I don't think it's really a problem
if somewhere down the document it gets a bit more complex. Tutorials etc.
would certainly be great, but I don't see much value in a primer. The spec
itself on the other hand needs to be complete and very accurate by
definition.


> HAL et al. are perceived as simple;
> using Hydra to express the same is certainly not harder,
> but I can understand why people perceive it as such:
> there's just much more that is possible with Hydra.

Then we should perhaps stress that point. Plain text is simpler than HTML,
yet people write HTML. I think the crucial thing is to get the value
proposition right.


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Sunday, 7 September 2014 20:56:45 UTC