Our own 100 years War
The religious battles continue - with rdf & RSS 1.0 fighting it out with XML & RSS 2.0 for world domination. Atom is somewhere in there - partially a third standard, and partially in support of XML and RSS 2.0. It’s hard to udnerstand why we all can’t just live together in peace.
This retort was just found on some of the lists…… it’s between Danny Ayers - who’s really a nice guy and supports the notion of supporting both formats, but doesn’t see why it’s so hard to do twice the work. And Joshua Allen of Microsoft.
Here’s the exchange….
> HTTP), so there’s clearly some overlap with RDF efforts. RSS
> 1.0 extensions must follow the constraints of RDF.Are there actually any RSS 1.0 extensions in popular use? I note that RSS 2.0 approach made it very easy for podcasting to catch hold, and this may be a consideration when evaluating an extensibility philosophy.
> rdf is reading) supporting both formats. Most syndication tools only
> support enough of the RDF model to be able to extract the
> syndication-domain data (there are notable exceptions,,,,This is perhaps wishful. Most syndication tools do not support RDF model at all, and simply read the RSS 1.0 file as XML. Most tools would barf given any of a number of isomorphic RDF models which stray even slightly from the expected XML syntax.
> course virtually all RDF tools can consume & process RSS 1.0
> out of the box). Developers of syndication tools tend to haveAgain, I would temper this — they can consume the RDF graph, but not as RSS (unless you meant to say “virtually all RDF-based syndication tools”).
> Why does it matter? I think RDF potentially stands to gain
> quite a lot from Atom, in the form of a relatively
> lightweight but versatile and thoroughly spec’ed transport
> (and editing protocol) which is likely to gain widespreadHow is this use case any different than using RSS (or Atom) as a protocol for moving around audio streams, bittorrent pointers to TV programs, and other payloads? The fact that RSS can be useful with a wide variety of payloads is evidence IMO that it defines a good separation between the protocol and payload, and my suggestion would be to treat RDF as an opaque payload exactly like any other.
This is so typical of the conversation going on - it’s just pointless.
A) If only the XML namespaces would get organized and formal about their extensions.
B) If only the rdf folks would quit drinking so much Koolaid, chill out and ship some compelling examples of WHY triples matter.
C) And maybe if some other, grey bearded software guys would help in establishing peace betwen these two camps - the youngsters would listen.
October 11th, 2004 at 5:22 pm
Hi Marc,
I appreciate your eagerness to identify and dissipate holy wars or “pointless” conversations (I feel the same way), but I believe you might have been too obstreperous to draw conclusions about the e-mail thread you posted above.
It’s a bit funny to see myself being characterized as anti-RDF. I have been criticized for being too *pro* RDF, for being too idealistic in my evangelism of the triples data model, and I am the first to argue that XML and RDF are naturally at peace (and for example, I wrote the FOAF importer for WinFS to show that WinFS is not all that incompatible with RDF). And none of this is really very secret about me.
Now, I agree that there have been holy wars between XML and RDF, but think we are mostly past those as a community. The two can and do complement one another.
The real difference in perspective (if there is one) between Danny and me highlighted in the quoted e-mail thread regards the appropriate amount of “layering” in a protocol like Atom/RSS which is intended to be a transport. For example, FOAF/RDF files are transported very effectively over HTTP, but HTTP does not need to have any knowledge of RDF. I don’t think it would be effective at all to try baking RDF concepts into HTTP. Same with RSS, SMTP, NNTP, or any other transport mechanism.
October 12th, 2004 at 3:31 am
Heh, I was going to comment saying pretty much the same as Joshua.
Regarding the holy war, there’s still the occasional skirmish, but from what I’ve seen on some of the lists in recent months (particularly Atom’s) there’s a lot more effort going into finding positions in which everyone’s reasonably comfortable.
In general more people are recognising the benefits of the RDF model (and the app list is growing), and it’s impossible to ignore the widespread deployment of domain-specific XML like RSS 2.0. So I’m optimistic that less energy is going into futile arguments and more into making the Web an interesting place.
On the point of argument in the mail, I do reckon the layering thing is still an open question - where should the lines be drawn between transport, metadata and content. All three are really just data, after all. I’m just uneasy at the idea of turning something full of structure and external linkage into an opaque blob.
Oh yeah, an don’t forget Joshua’s a nice guy!