- From: Ian Davis <iand@internetalchemy.org>
- Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:50:55 +0000
- To: Phil Dawes <pdawes@users.sf.net>
- CC: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
On 23/11/2004 17:14, Phil Dawes wrote: > 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). I came to this opinion a while back so I've given up trying. In fact I came to a stronger conclusion - it was a huge mistake ever to promote an XML serialisation of RDF. Doing so raised expectations that you would be able to process it using XML tools such as XPath and XSLT. It would have been better to concentrate on the model and its advantages and leave the XML community to come up with their own syntax. Easy for me to say with the benefit of hindsight. I don't think anyone could have foreseen the problems at the time. > > Maybe pushing turtle more is a good idea. What do people think? I agree very strongly. Turtle is cleanly specified, has a sensible character encoding policy and is very easy to learn. One can become productive in Turtle by learning only a few constructs, such as single line triples, then move into richer syntax as confidence grows. Turtle has the distinct advantage over XML in that it's easy to append new information without having to parse the entire document - very useful for logging type applications. > > Cheers, > > Phil Ian
Received on Wednesday, 24 November 2004 11:50:50 UTC