xml-dev - RE: A certain difficulty

[Mark Birbeck <Mark.Birbeck@iedigital.net>]

Pierre-Antoine CHAMPIN wrote:
> I find the RDF model very simple and uniform (it's all about triples)

Exactly. And IMO that's ALL its about!

> In the contrary, the XML syntax is a bit confuse, true.

But a lot of that arises from trying to make it so that almost any XML
document can be interpreted as a set of triples. If you stuck to just
the RDF namespace elements it would still be useful, but with the
abbreviations we can store this as a triple too, despite the fact that
there's no RDF namespace in sight:

	<person name="fred" />

> In my point of view, the problem comes from the recommandation mixing
> modeling and syntaxic aspects (I won't mention semantic aspects !)
> in a way it's hard to differentiate them without some RDF experience.

I can't really tell whether the answer is more RDF knowledge. I'd
suggest though that if you have ever tried to build a dynamic database
that contains both the data *and* the schema in the same structure, then
having RDFS and RDF being closely aligned won't cause you any problems.
In fact its very welcome. (I'm not saying everyone has done that, just
that there are plenty of concepts outside of RDF that help you get a
handle on it.)

Mark

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