Re: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 15:13 +0100, Mark Birbeck wrote:
>> The original point of this thread seemed to me to be saying that if
>> .htaccess is the key to the semantic web, then it's never going to
>> happen.
>
> It simply isn't the key to the semantic web though.
>
> .htaccess is a simple way to configure Apache to do interesting things.
> It happens to give you a lot of power in deciding how requests for URLs
> should be translated into responses of data. If you have hosting which
> allows you such advanced control over your settings, and you can create
> nicer URLs, then by all means do so - and not just for RDF, but for all
> your URLs. It's a Good Thing to do, and in my opinion, worth switching
> hosts to achieve.
>
> But all that isn't necessary to publish linked data. If you own
> example.com, you can upload foaf.rdf and give yourself a URI like:
>
>         <http://example.com/foaf.rdf#alice>
>
> (Or foaf.ttl, foaf.xhtml, whatever.)

This just works and is how the html web grew. Write a document and
save it into a publuc spaxe. Fancy stuff like pretty URIs need more
work but are not at all necessary for linked data or the semantic web.


>
> Let's not blow this all out of proportion.

Hear hear!

> --
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 19:47:46 UTC