Re: Help! RDF & HTML Compatibility

Dan Brickley writes:

 > Yes, the love-it-or-loathe-it syntactic flexibility of RDF stems in
 > large part from this issue. We needed to have a way of writing RDF
 > assertions within documents that would be fed to old style HTML
 > rendering engines, and not have chunks of RDF data spew out into the
 > human oriented view of the document.

I'll add the footnote that a group of us on the XML WG argued
vigorously that HTML pages should reference RDF and similar XML-based
data externally, as they do with images, Java applets, and sound clips
(to name only three).  That would have saved all of the ugly syntactic
contortions for RDF and P3P (which used RDF at the time), and would
have allowed us to avoid using attributes for Namespace declarations.

We lost the debate, of course.  Two years later, it's hard to know who
was right, or whether it even mattered -- client-side XML on the Web
remains virtually non-existant, and nearly all paying XML work is
business-to-business (even with RDF).


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

Received on Saturday, 23 December 2000 11:08:11 UTC