Birthdays - XML is 10 and RDF/XML is 9
Happy 10th Birthday XML.
It’s clear you are going to be around for some time. People know your good points and bad and have got the kinks worked out using you in production, in diversity and at scale.
Take care not to be distracted in the next 10 years by sexy new text formats that overlap in some features, but don’t replace you for many uses. I’m talking about you, JSON.
In the RDF world, RDF/XML is the syntax people love to hate, or just love/hate. It is 1 year younger than you, so maybe in February 2009 we’ll have something to celebrate about that. Yeah, it might happen :)
I recently made a new textual RDF syntax sibling Turtle with TimBL whose official birthday was last month, although it’s actual birth was January 2004 in Bristol, or earlier if you look into it’s ancestry. In 6 (10?) more years it’ll be something we can properly rely on, like XML is today.
Dave
P.S. For more memories, check out Tim, Eve and Norm who were involved in XML from very early on when I was just an observer.
11 February 2008 at 7:44 am
By far my favorite format to emit from jena is labaled “N3″, however, I noticed that the jena team uses the “.ttl” extension for data that looks like it’s in the same format. I’m still confused regarding turtle and n3. If I emit “TURTLE” it’s a terribly flat/hyper-normalized list of triples.
Another nice format is OWL concrete abstract format, although the “value( x y)” keyword seems unecessary. I think it might be wise, where it concerns RDF, to emphasise the non-xml formats, outside of RDFa, where it is necessarily xml. I know there are exceptions, but the XML world in general is steeped in a “rooted tree” frame of reference…while the rest of the world is weary of saying the same thing , at least where data in concerned.
7 March 2008 at 2:16 am
[...] web community could learn a lot from, as their favoured engineering standard (something called RDF) celebrates is 9th birthday, with a little help from Dave Beckett. Before I go off on another semantic web rant, let’s move on. Engineers like simplicity, but [...]