Re: I guess it?s a stupid questions?

On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 02:42:32AM +0800, Petko Petkov wrote:
> I guess it?s a stupid question, but I still do not understand why RDF is better than just XML.

Consider this XML document;

<Person xmlns="http://example.org/foofoo/">
  <name>Mark Smith</name>
  <age>55</age>
</Person>

Wouldn't it be nice to know that you could add whatever you wanted
after name & age there, and that this would be associated with the
Person resource in a consistent manner that wouldn't break already
deployed software?  With just XML and syntactic schemas, you can't
just willy nilly add stuff like that because the schema - and more
importantly the software which processes that schema - may not allow
it.

But did you realize that the XML document above is also a valid RDF/XML
document?  It is.  And when treated as such, instead of as vanilla XML,
you get the advantages I mentioned; that "name" and "age" are considered
"properties" of a resource of type "Person".

RDF/XML - putting the "X" in "XML"

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

Received on Friday, 12 November 2004 19:18:38 UTC