Whatever the merits of RDF, so-called RDF-XML was an utter and
complete crock, the slpadash result of happy-go-taggy weekenders
projecting their experience with tossing tags into Netscape and
Explorer.
I actually thought it was quite clever: it maximized the chances that
existing XML documents could be processed as RDF, though of
course not 100% of them.
Using it as the first and only syntax, of course, was — unfortunate.