- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 20:08:14 -0400 (EDT)
- To: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- cc: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, pat hayes wrote: > >Now, why did the RDF WG chose XML instead of s-expressions or > >something else elegant? I wasn't there, but I love rumor mongering > >and wild speculation. Maybe they figured in the mood of the day, it > >would give RDF a leg up. And it probably did, with the librarians. > >Perhaps it wasn more of a leg iron to the computer scientists, though. > > Quite, and elegantly put. Some of the work that fed into the RDF design didn't use XML. eg: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-pics-ng-metadata (RDF's origins as a pornography description framework aka PICS-NG) or Guha's MCF stuff, http://www.guha.com/mcf/wp.html which itself went through the XMLization process, http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/ Probably the main reason for XMLizing all this is so that RDF could be mixed freely with other content, eg. embedded in SVG graphics, XHTML etc. http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG-access/ and so it could embed fragments of other markup languages (eg. MathML). You might ask why those folks use pointy brackets instead of curvy ones, but that's not an argument worth having in 2001... --danbri
Received on Thursday, 30 August 2001 20:08:15 UTC