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Hi Dare,
On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 03:33:33PM -0700, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> The claim that XML was self describing was bogus in the first place and was part of the yester-years XML hype. As for your definition of self describing at http://www.markbaker.ca/Talks/2004-xmlself/slide11-0.html doesn't jibe with the real world.
As you observe in the first sentence, I think it's clear that the real
world doesn't understand what self-description is.
> Who develops applications by HTTP GETing a resource, checking the media type and then reading the appropriate RFC?
Hmm, I don't understand why you think I said that.
> So it seems your claim at http://www.markbaker.ca/Talks/2004-xmlself/slide20-0.html is that I can' t arbitrarily extend an XML document without it's schema or without breaking some application somewhere. I'm unclear as to what you mean by the document's schema but will grant that it is likely that arbitrary additions to an expected content of an XML document will break certain applications.
Ok, good.
> I finally got to http://www.markbaker.ca/Talks/2004-xmlself/slide24-0.html and don't much understand what you are getting at. I'm not sure what difference there is in extending a format by adding namespaced extensions and using RDF in the way you describe.
RDF provides an evolutionary story for XML; it enables to-be-developed
software to process old documents, and old software to process
yet-to-be-authored documents.
> You claim that one can use HTTP GET on RDF URIs but similarly one can use HTTP GET on the namespace of extension elements and attributes. This isn't theoretical, this is how most people working with XML formats like RSS (even the RDF flavor) do it today.
I meant this, which I don't think is common practice;
http://esw.w3.org/topic/WebClosure
i.e. if you came upon this document;
<person xmlns="http://example.com/some-ns/";>
<name>Fred Foo</name>
<age>52</age>
<oiajsd>M</oiajsd>
</person>
that a GET on http://example.com/some-ns/oiajsd might return some
document which asserts;
<http://example.com/some-ns/oiajsd> owl:sameAs
<http://orlando.drc.com/daml/Ontology/Person/3.1/Person-ont.daml#gender>
If the software recognizes the latter URI, then it can extract all the
semantics from that document.
But I'm not going to try and convince you of the value of that, because
I'm not entirely sure of it myself; I've never used it in any of the
RDF projects I've worked on. But the other value-add I mentioned I've
used in spades, so I'm not just yanking your chain here; listen to that
Joshua fellow. 8-)
Mark.
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