Re: SV: The semantic web

Right. Human-legibility is not an intrinsically bad thing - it is indeed
helpful. But it is one of those things where near is (other things being
equal) good enough.

Charles

On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, Greg FitzPatrick wrote:

  > Charles McCN:
  > As I understood it, RDF was meant to be read by machines, rather than by
  > people. What the syntax looks like is almost irrelevant in the content of
  a
  > user interface that people are expected to use anyway.
  >
  
  I dont quite agree with you.  We have had this up before in a short
  discussion during the "certain difficulty" thread.
  
  Though in one sense (for the machines in an A2A environment) it surely holds
  that there is no reason to have human readable code/syntax, remember that
  RDF development is to a large extent a consensus process.  Human readable
  syntax is of the greatest benefit.
  
  We are constantly looking at each others examples on this list and it is
  quite (relatively) easy to picture what is going on.
  
  XML stipulates in 1.1 Origin and Goals. XML documents should be
  human-legible and reasonably clear.  RDF M&S doesn't explicitly say this but
  I think it is part of the deal.
  
  Of course, what disadvantages (if any) human-legibility  and consequently
  verbosity and bloat cause later on in the process is another matter.
  
  Greg
  
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia 

Received on Thursday, 13 April 2000 11:44:52 UTC