Reject then reinvent..?

Probably the most significant differences between the Userland 0.9x
fork and rss-dev's RSS 1.0 were that the former eschewed XML
namespaces and RDF support.

I think it was around 2001 the <enclosure> element was added to the
Userland branch, allowing it to point to media files. This brought
back one of the capabilities that went with RDF, where a resource is a
resource, and you don't really need a new element when the mime type
changes.

Then when RSS 2.0 came along, it included namespace support - no
namespace of its own, but namespaced elements could now be added.

Yesterday Microsoft announced an extension [1] for RSS 2.0 that gives
support for the list data structure, something else that RSS/RDF has
been capable of for 5 years.

Looks like a pattern's emerging...

I was wondering if there were any other cases around where a spec
avoided using something like RDF on religious grounds, then later
crept back in exactly that direction. (Or if anyone knows whatever
happened to WinFS...)

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/understanding/rss/simplefeedextensions/

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http://dannyayers.com