Resource Description Format and XML-Data

[Tim Bray]

At 11:31 PM 29/01/98 +1100, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>In another forum the RDF people agreed that they *could* use the standard
>DTD syntax to markup the information they wanted. 

This statement is incorrect.  In fact, RDF, like many other SGML 
applications, has syntactic restrictions on what you can do that go well 
beyond what's expressible in DTDs.  The RDFers feel (rightly) that what 
they want to achieve ought to be within the reach of a declarative schema
facility, and are concerned that none such exists.

But I'm pretty sure that's not why XML-Data exists.

>RDF does not need a new declaration syntax. They just don't want to be
>standard.

Inflammatory statements like this are defensible only when they're
accurate.  This one is not.

>This being the case, XML-data should not use "XML DTDs cannot support the
>needs of super-hyper-important things like RDF" as a justification for
>what they are doing.

It is just as easy to conclude from the evidence that XML-Data is in
direct competition with RDF and RDF-Schema.  I honestly don't know what
the understanding of the authors of XML-Data is as regards things like
RDF, and so far, nobody has said. -T.

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