Some questions

[Jeffrey E. Sussna]

As an RDF user, I agree with all comments about the complexity of its syntax
and the specification itself. I spent about a month reading and rereading
the RDF spec before I concluded it really was as conceptually simple as it
had appeared on first reading.

On the subject of its potential, I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes,
RDF does move things up the semantic food chain. Yes, XML is kind of like a
good orthogonal machine instruction set, which needs 3G, 4G, and 5G
languages on top of it. But I still see RDF as being useful for metadata,
not for every kind of object-oriented conversation you'd want to have. I
wouldn't consider RDF at the same level as CORBA, but perhaps part of an
overall solution.

Jeff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
> [mailto:owner-xml-dev at ic.ac.uk]On Behalf Of
> Tim Bray
> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 1999 12:41 PM
> To: 'xml-dev at ic.ac.uk'
> Subject: RE: Some questions
>
>
> At 12:22 PM 12/1/99 -0800, Ron Daniel wrote:
> >and here is my attempt to give an example of why RDF
> >is useful:
>
> Very good, Ron.  Well said.
>
> And here is my attempt to explain why RDF hasn't been more successful:
>
>   The syntax is hideously ugly and hard to understand, and
> the spec worries
>   so hard about being correct and complete that it is pretty well 100%
>   incomprehensible to ordinary people.
>
> I probably just hurt some feelings, but I've already shouted
> this in private
> enough times that it won't be a surprise.
>
> In my opinion RDF needs some serious sugar-coating and tutorializing
> if it is ever going to achieve its potential.
>
> I think its potential is huge, dwarfing that of XML.   -Tim
>
>
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