Re: Why not XHTML+RDF? was Re: Links are links

Jonathan,

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Jonathan Borden wrote:

> No doubt. I wonder why Hytime never took off. Was it too complicated? Hard
> to implement? Should we reconsider decisions made in 1992-1996 in light of
> stuff available today? Yet even if we reconsider, can Hytime gain the
> mindset of web folks c. 2002?

Mostly I think it was because the spec was so confusing as to be
barely intelligible (for a variety of reasons), so the motivation and
structure of it was almost completely opaque.  The syntax was nasty,
but so what, that could just be written off as a proof of concept, to
demonstrate that though the ideas were abstract they were probably
usable.

I don't see it being possible for HyTime to leap back to life (as Paul
said), but it's as true now as two years ago[1], that

    What appears to be happening now is that HyTime is being reinvented
    piecemeal -- in the auxiliary specs -- which is bad for just the
    reasons Nils mentioned: specs seem to contradict each other, act
    on different information sets, require a forest of new terminology
    and concepts which may or may not be isomorphic to each other.
    I can see that there's the intention of making these specs more
    accessible by being less general, but the `issues' listed in, say,
    the 19991220 version of XLink simply illustrate that as XLink becomes
    more nearly finished, it becomes more abstract, and more and more
    like HyTime without the elegance.

Exaggerating only slightly, I'd suggest that it is not worth taking
seriously any spec in this area that does not make explicit how it has
either absorbed or rejected HyTime's contribution. [OK, that's perhaps
a leeeettle more than a _slight_ exaggeration]

Norman


[1] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200001/msg00981.html

-- 
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Norman Gray                        http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK     norman@astro.gla.ac.uk

Received on Thursday, 3 October 2002 06:27:10 UTC