At 10:33 PM -0400 6/2/04, Michael Champion wrote:

>Oddly enough, ERH has written off the Semantic Web as hype at just 
>about the time I'm starting to take it seriously.  Not that I 
>disagree with anything in his posting from the WWW conference, just 
>that I'm starting to see what I think were two missing ingredients 
>start to emerge.

I've been thinking more about the semantic web myself. I still 
suspect it's mostly hype, but I'm beginning to see some potential 
uses. I'm thinking about exploring some of those ideas in my XML 
class at Poly this semester. I'll yell if anything interesting pops 
up.

Part of what bothers me about the semantic web is syntax. It's too 
ugly to be practical. And syntax does matter. XML succeeded where 
SGML failed not because XML can do anything SGML can't (except maybe 
internationalization) but because the XML syntax story is cleaner and 
more approachable. The RDF syntax is just too ugly to be plausible.

The basic idea of RDF that seems useful is naming things with 
standard URIs. However, I simply don't see how the RDF syntax 
improves on XML+namespaces for that, and XML+namespaces is so much 
nicer a syntax than RDF.

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA