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by Bill de hÓra.
Original Post: RDF: I fought the markup, and the markup won
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I spoke with a colleague of mine yesterday. He's working with XUL/Mozilla at the moment. His least favourite bit? The RDF/XML. Hates it. Since he knows I'm an RDF fan, he rightly wonders what could I see in it. So... here's a six year old markup language, that started with three syntactic forms all lumped together; that was an early testbed for how to use namespaces; whose opportunity for real development in the W3C was hamstrung by its charter (and yet, while equally constrained, the model was rewritten from the ground up). Even its own working group didn't use it. I gave him a thirty minute run down on RDF (and inevitably, RSS) history, explaining as best I could how we got here and why some of us think the RDF metadata has a lot to offer. I outlined some of the key thinkers behind it, early considerations as a syndication and device profiling format (my colleague, like a number people in Propylon, really understand the issues around device/phone profiling); why it's a good thing not to just have property-value pairs, but to explicitly name the thing that is being associated with the property; that we can enable stuff like third party distributed metadata, have precise definitions for properties, types and classes; that we can use it to help unify disparate data sets; that we can create and merge rich data graphs by using URIs as identifiers; that we can simplify data management and interchange; that we can think about extensibility in data as well as modularity; that in a pinch, we can fire up wget and see if a URI has any documentation. That in the long run, since RDF has a formal model, we can inference and query over data sets just we do with SQL, while unshackling the data from the database and maybe alleviating the extreme autism we see in relational data today. But for the syntax, I had no good answers or justification for sticking with it. The world is not overflowing with RDF/XML, and there is minimal (if any) infrastructure built on it. And as he astutely pointed out, the triples under the hood are meant to be preserved during transformation - indeed, that's the whole point. Today, I ran across a post from Leigh, from last year, on Dorothea's RDF syntax rant: Her posting made me wonder whether this frustration is down to the basic elements of the RDF syntax, e.g. the element and attribute names, or it's inherent variability: that there are multiple ways to encode the same data using slightly different syntactic structures. I'm guessing -- and I'm hoping Dorothea will step in to correct me here - that most of frustration is because of the variability. That's certainly the cause of much griping from hackers keen to use plain old XML tools on RDF data. The variability defeats any attempt to use, e.g. XSLT, without an initial normalization step. - Leigh Dodds (RDF Syntax: Profiling and Styling) Leigh is far more patient than I am. Variability is only part of it. No-one I know can write it down without making mistakes, no-one I know can read it without getting confused. But people are expected to believe after coming into contact with RDF/XML, that RDF is really quite simple. And that the tools will save them. But this doesn't mean that we have to throw out the syntax entirely. I think we should consider throwing it out. The model was thrown out without anyone batting an eyelid. The syntax has been around for over half a decade - it's not catching on and I remain convinced that nothing hurts RDF adoption more than RDF/XML. Perhaps most damning, it's completely failed the dogfood test - if the W3C won't use the markup they're specifying, why would they expect anyone else to?...
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