xml-dev - Re: RDF, again

[Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>]

David Megginson wrote:
> 
> Not only could we, but many of us have -- I've written quite a few
> thousand lines of LISP in my life, and I know that it works fine for
> representing data structures, but nobody uses it.  XML also works
> fine, and everyone uses it.  So, let's get on to the interesting
> stuff, and actually start doing something with information rather than
> just marking it up.

But we haven't got around to marking it up. We haven't got around to
defining a syntax that we all agree upon for encoding structured
property/value pairs. The heavily minimized version of your example is
easy to read in the traditional XML sense but it is very hard to puzzle
out the RDF graph for it. The uniminized one is great for machine to
machine but not at all appropriate for anything humans would work with.
Why do we have to choose?

Markup is a tool. When it gets in the way, we should replace it.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for himself
"Like most religious texts, the XML 1.0 spec has proven itself 
internally-inconsistent, so we're going to have to invent some kind of 
exegetical method now to show how it's really all an allegory." - Anon



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