- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:16:08 +0100
On 17/1/09 23:30, L. David Baron wrote: > On Saturday 2009-01-17 22:25 +0200, Henri Sivonen wrote: >> The story of RDF is very different. Of the top four engines, only Gecko >> has RDF functionality. It was implemented at a time when RDF was a young >> W3C REC and stuff that were W3C RECs were implemented less critically >> than nowadays. > > Actually, the implementation was well underway *before* RDF was a > W3C REC, done by a team led by one of the designers of RDF. In > other words, it was in Gecko because there were RDF advocates at > Netscape (although advocating, I think, a somewhat different RDF > than the current RDF recommendations). Yes, Netscape had this stuff when it was still called MCF. W3C's RDF took ideas from several input activities, including MCF, Microsoft XML-Data, PICS, and requirements from the Dublin Core community. But it looks more like MCF than the others. MCF was originally proposed by R.V.Guha at Apple; it followed him from Apple to Netscape in 1997, and when the Mozilla sources were later thrown over the wall, there was a lot of MCF in there. MCF White Paper, 1996 http://www.guha.com/mcf/wp.html spec, http://www.guha.com/mcf/mcf_spec.html While this was at Apple, there was a product/viewer called HotSauce / Project X, and some early grassroots adoption of MCF as a text format for publishing website summaries. http://web.archive.org/web/19961224042753/http://hotsauce.apple.com/ http://downlode.org/Etext/MCF/macworld_online.html It was at this stage that dialog started with the Library scene and Dublin Core folk, about how it related to their notion of catalogue records, and to the evolving PICS labelling system, format and protocol being built at W3C. eg. http://www.ssrc.hku.hk/tb-issues/TidBITS-355.html#lnk3 http://web.archive.org/web/19980215092626/http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/mcf/ The MCF/RSS relationship is a whole other story, eg. see http://www.scripting.com/midas/mcf.html http://www.scripting.com/frontier/siteMap.mcf http://web.archive.org/web/19990222114619/http://www.xspace.net/hotsauce/sites.html Then the thing moved to Netscape. Tim Bray helped Guha XMLize the spec, which was submitted to W3C in 1997, where it joined the existing efforts to extend PICS to include text labels and more structure - http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-pics-ng-metadata http://www.daml.org/committee/minutes/2000-12-07-RDF-design-rationale.ppt http://searchenginewatch.com/2165291 So the June 97 spec was http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/ .. you can see from the figures that the technology was very RDF-shaped, http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/#sec2. Also a tutorial at http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/MCF-tutorial.html Netscape press release accompanying June 13 1997 submission - http://web.archive.org/web/20010308150737/http://cgi.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease432.html Less than 4 months later, this came out as a W3C Working Draft called "RDF": http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax-971002/ ... in a shape that didn't really change much subsequently. RDF wasn't the same design exactly as MCF but the ancestry is clear enough. And getting back to the original point, yeah Mozilla had MCF sitemaps code in there. Revisiting http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/9-8-97/312711&EDATE= http://www.irt.org/articles/js086/ and the like, it's clear that RDF was very much a child of the 1st browser wars. In retrospect the direction it took within Mozilla didn't do anyone much good. The earliest MCF apps were about public data on the public Web, feeds, sitemaps and so on. But eventually the ambition to be a complete information hub led to MCF/RDF being used for pretty much everything *inside* Mozilla. And I don't think that turned out very well. http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/api.html etc. The RDF vocabularies it used were poorly or never documented (I have some guilt there) and when Netscape went away, the incentive to connect to public data on the Web seemed to drop (no more tie-ins with the 'what's related' annotation server, 'dmoz' etc.). RDF drifted from being a Web data format to be consumed *by* the browser, into an engineering tool to be used in the construction *of* the browser, ie. as a datasource abstraction within Mozilla APIs. While I can certainly see the value of having a unified view of mail, news, sitemaps, and so on, the Moz code at the time wasn't really in a position to match up to the language in the press releases. Not making any particular point here beyond connecting up to the MCF heritage... cheers, Dan -- http://danbri.org/
Received on Sunday, 18 January 2009 02:16:08 UTC