Re: [xml-dev] XML Redux

[Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>]

On 16 February 2011 17:26, Kurt Cagle <kurt.cagle@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > If the aim is a simple syntax for arbitrary data, you could do worse
>> > than Turtle [1], e.g.
>>
>> ha, what started off as 'simplifying xml' seems to have ended up at
>> rdf....
>>
> +1
> There is something vaguely surreal about that.

So true.

The recent history of RDF formats has been quite twisty. Although
RDF/XML is still the standard interchange between machines, it has
been getting rather sidelined with Turtle being used for handwriting
and JSON growing as a de facto standard for Web APIs. Then there's
RDFa (in HTML) which has been getting big adoption for doc metadata
(finally something has hit that spot!).

If you look at those developments alongside the way the leading doc
format (HTML) seems to have hopped off the XML track, perhaps there's
a pattern emerging.

Arguably a lot of XML's complexities come from the doc/data dichotomy,
so maybe it's falling between two stools, and better optimised,
simpler formats have evolved on each side.

In other words, what do you want a simplified XML for:
docs? - just use HTML(5+)
data? - just use Turtle

XML itself isn't redundant, far from it, there are plenty of things
like Atom, DocBook, ODF etc for which it seems a good fit. But in
cases like that, would a simplified XML work as well?

I guess I don't really see what role a simplified XML could play that
isn't already adequately covered.

Cheers,
Danny.


-- 
http://danny.ayers.name