W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > www-rdf-interest@w3.org > November 2004

Is promoting RDF+XML a lost cause?

From: Phil Dawes <pdawes@users.sf.net>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:14:56 +0000
Message-ID: <16803.28688.950379.503472@gargle.gargle.HOWL>
To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org

Hi All,

I've been reading a lot of XML vs RDF heat recently, and am thinking
that we've got a bit of a unsurmountable problem when it comes to XML.

I'm arriving at the opinion that we'll never be able to convince the
majority of developers and hackers to use RDF/XML instead of XML. It's
just too complicated, even in a cut down form. I suspect that even a
striped XML format is too confusing (the team I work for had problems
with this, and they're bright people).

Why? I think it's because the RDF model isn't obvious in the
serialisation.

The XML infoset is palatable because it corresponds to what people see
when they read XML - i.e. a tree with attributes. 
Unfortunately people don't see triples (or a graph) when looking at
RDF/XML - they see a tree, with additional nasty RDF syntax.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Ideally we'd be pushing a simpler,
terse, more graph-friendly syntax (maybe a cut down version of
turtle). The problem of course is that most developers hearts and
minds are already committed to XML for data interchange.

Maybe pushing turtle more is a good idea. What do people think?

Cheers,

Phil
Received on Tuesday, 23 November 2004 17:17:52 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Friday, 17 January 2020 22:44:53 UTC