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On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 01:45:27PM -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> dareo@microsoft.com (Dare Obasanjo) writes:
> >Articles like this go a long way towards convincing me that the RDF
> >folks are very determined to prevent people from actually using their
> >technology or the Semantic Web. ;)
>
> I'm not sure it goes that far; in many ways, this is a fine exegesis of
> how to create human-readable RDF. I just don't like it proposed as a
> model for creating XML.
The best thing about this article is that it is *a* model for creating
XML.
There are precious few guidelines for creating XML vocabularies.
As it stands, we're still pretty much still in a free-for-all state
when it comes to markup design. A few issues have gotten some
discussion (when to use attributes vs. elements), but many of the
larger issues are being learned and re-learned each time a designer
creates a new vocabulary.
I like this article because it accomplishes what it sets out to do:
discuss markup design issues for people who want to make their
vocabularies RDF-friendly.
It would be nice if there were other such documents on how to make
your vocabularies XSLT-friendly, Schema-friendly, Human-friendly,
CSS-friendly, database-friendly or whatnot. Markup designers can
then balance various different concerns to create a vocabulary that
offers maximum utility, rather than minimizing designer effort.
Instead, we are left with a hodgepodge of vocabularies where the
primary design goal is, for example, mimicking a particular database
structure, *not* vocabularies where the primary design goals are
to be used as XML files per se.
Z.
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