On Tuesday, November 9, 2004, at 08:29 AM, James Robertson wrote:
Discussions of RDF in mixed company (RDF-using/non-RDF-using) remind me of the book/movie "Flatland". I myself am a Flatlander (non-RDF-using), but I have a sense that there's another world out there that I don't quite understand.And the best extension mechanism is RDF.
Without commenting on the merits of RDF, I think that RSS 2.0 demonstrates the real-world fact that using namespaced modules >>> works.
There are many on this list that don't believe this. I think a very large part of the W3C does not believe this, and the guy who invented the Web, Tim Berner's Lee, who thought about it in the early 80ies, when most people had trouble understanding what computers were, let alone the net, does not believe this.
They can disbelieve it all they want. The fact is, there are a large number of namespaced modules for RSS 2.0, and most aggregators support an awful lot of them. In BottomFeeder, it takes me a few minutes to support any new module that seems to be of interest.
Namespaced modules for RSS 2.0 do just fine for those of us who are writing tools to work with newsfeeds, but something tells me that once you start trying to work with many different formats using the same tools, RDF might make your job a lot easier. The RDF-users may wish to confirm or deny that the newsfeed-only vs. many-formats axis is where it really starts to matter.
As a Flatlander, I personally don't want Atom to be loaded up with RDF stuff, because it just doesn't matter to me. But if it can be done with <em>minimal</em> changes from what we have now, I see no reason not to do it.
Antone
