[tdwg-content] What RDF is (Was Re: Idea for Discussion, Differentiating between "type's" of identifiers)

[Bob Morris]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 8:53 AM, Peter DeVries <pete.devries at gmail.com> wrote:
>[...]
> I think part of the problem we are having is that people are not recognizing
> how different RDF is from straight XML.
> ...

It's way worse than that.  RDF is not XML at all.  RDF/XML is merely a
serialization of RDF  It's not even the most human readable
serialization. In fact it is one of the \worst/ for humans who need to
figure out what triples are actually in play.   It is so ubiquitous
only because there are more tools that can process RDF/XML than any of
the other RDF serialization syntaxes (syntices???).  The persistent
myth that human readability is an advantage of XML pretty much ignores
all the use cases that humans have for reading something. It's about
as readable as Lisp. Indeed, a Lisp loving colleague said of XML on
the occasion of its first W3 recommendation : "I get it.  It's Lisp
with pointy brackets."

Bob

-- 
Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: morris.bob at gmail.com
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
_______________________________________________
tdwg-content mailing list
tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content