- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 20:06:54 -0800
- To: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>, "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: "Dan Connolly" <connolly@w3.org>, <www-tag@w3.org>
> misunderstanding your answer). Let's assume we indeed had > whatever was the "ideal" XML serialization of RDF, the one ... > Question: to what extent would XML -based tools then be a > first class means of doing RDF queries? I still have an This is a very insightful question. In fact, I believe that the example of RSS 1.0 (the version of RSS that is based on RDF) proves your concerns to be valid. Many news aggregator applications have "support" for RSS 1.0, using naïve XML parsers. However, if the RDF of the feed is serialized using a triple-oriented format analagous to TriX, most news aggregators would break. The whole ecosystem works, for now, because producers of the RSS 1.0 feeds are careful to emit files that conform to the XML format that the aggregators expect. In other words, RSS 1.0 claims to be an RDF vocabulary, but in practice it ends up being an XML schema. Introducing bnodes, as any triple-oriented format must do, is almost guaranteed to break the people who "support" RDF with naïve XML parsers. Now, I personally feel that a triple-oriented syntax is warranted, and should be used in favor of the current XML/RDF syntax. The fact that some users can muddle along with the current syntax is an unreliable and brittle bug, IMO. It's sheer luck that it ever works for these news aggregators in the first place, and only the aggregators who use actual RDF parsers (there are some) should expect it to work.
Received on Thursday, 18 March 2004 23:07:29 UTC