- From: Walter Underwood <wunder@infoseek.com>
- Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 09:33:44 -0800
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>, xml-dev@xml.org, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
At 06:20 PM 2/27/00 -0500, Dan Brickley wrote: > > My suggestion is that you ASK THE USER before rewritting it or killing it. >[...] > > I'm starting the "Save the RDF" movement. > >Things seem to have got a little alarmist! Nobody is talking about >rewriting or killing it. Though some people are talking about letting it sink or swim, and not shedding too many tears if it sinks. It is OK for technologies to fail in the market. It is even OK for a W3C Recommendation to fail. I used MCF (a predecessor of RDF) in a product while working at an OODB company, and I still couldn't understand the spec. I finally figured it out, but it took an entire flight to Chicago to do it. MCF was incompletly and inconsistantly documented, but I made it work, and it was quite useful. But even after understanding it, I doubt that I'll be using it in our products. It fails my basic architectural test (I think this is from Rob Pike): simple things must be simple, hard things must be possible, and you must be able to use part of it without understanding all of it. It's too complex for the simple things, too hard to explain how it helps the hard things, and non-modular. wunder -- Walter R. Underwood Senior Staff Engineer Infoseek Software GO Network, part of The Walt Disney Company wunder@infoseek.com http://software.infoseek.com/cce/ (my product) http://www.best.com/~wunder/ 1-408-543-6946
Received on Monday, 28 February 2000 12:33:54 UTC