lower case semantics
Eric Meyer is giving a session at SXSW called ‘Emergent Semantics’ - which (as opposed ot Emergent Democracy) appears to be the religion of the day.
A RESTful approach - which ignores APIs, meta-data and many other efforts and standards being established on the web today. There seems to be a pre-occupatoopn with ’simple’ is better, to the detriment of working together with others.
Eric calls it a Ground up - grass roots effort - yet there are some fairly formal things going on. Eric claims it’s an evolutionary approach and it’s based upon established standards like XHTML. Yet isn’t XHTML fairly new itself?
Semantics get added in an ad hoc way. I certainly groove on that idea.
But to refute server based technology, XML and APIs - seems a bit extreme to me.
I’ve often wondered why some people differentiate between UPPER case and lower case semantics. But from what I see - these lower case folks seem to have their OWN dogma.
Issues:
hcal instead of iCal (the rdf iCal.)
microformat instead of micro-content (perhaps their defintion of microformat is at the single verb/noun level - while I define micro-content tobe fairly richly structured chnucks of content - specifcially content.)
XFN instead of FOAF
why only REST? Whatever happened to XML-RPC and SOAP?
embedded in a page versus in a file
XML vs RDF
XFN Me links and the MeNow namespace
One thing that Eric and I agree upon - is the metaphor of archipelagos.
I also like his notion of crossed links with XFN - ways to cross breed and mutate these microformat ntions. Eric claims the pieces are there now - maybe - maybe not.
But one thing I totally disagree with is - where’s the meta-data? Eric said “it’s all meta-data” - then why avoid using the term?
No I don’t wanna come off as some sort of RDF zealot - but I also don’t like to see one-sided thinking. In some cases - these standards are just arbitray spin-offs - not necessarily grounded in any stable principle other than “NOT rdf” or “NOT semantic web”.
Why can’t we work together?
What’s wrong with a ‘pseudo-schema’ we all can agree upon BEFORE it’s ‘rendered’ into a specific distribution method? i.e. pre-RSS ificiation. Or Atomization for that matter.
I really think 2005 can be the year that various viewpoints on how to build standards - can come together - for the benefit of all.
“Don’t pave the cow paths” seems like a really reasonable approach. I just gotta wonder what’s wrong with FOAFnet, meta-data and calling it micro-content - beside sthet fact that someone else has defined it and that they’re associated with rdf.
Or maybe it’s about an aritrary demand that nothing can be too complex and that it MUST be really really really really simple. Maybe they’ll create their OWN subscription format called RRRRS.