Inspired by Sowa’s
Law of Standards,
Jon Udell writes;
My guess is that we’ll see a de facto alternative to the W3C’s proposed semantic-web standards — Web Ontology Language and RDF
It could happen, but I don’t think so. I could definitely see a
new XML serialization of RDF happening this way though, but RDF itself?
It’s already very simple, and has even sacrificed some expressiveness (e.g.
quads)
in the name of maintaining that simplicity. I think that’s good and healthy, and
I can’t imagine any other spec doing what it can and being any simpler,
nor can I imagine being able to remove much from RDF and still have it be
useful to a lot of people.
I haven’t done enough with OWL to have a strong feeling about it, but it
doesn’t seem to add much in the way of (required) complexity AFAICT. For
most people, it’s, just another RDF vocabulary.
In the same post he also references some words by Mike O’Dell on the
problems with DNS. He comments;
I have no idea whether, or how, “distributed system technology” might finesse the governance issue. But it’s a challenge worth pondering.
Jon might be interested in what the
zLabs
(“z” for “decentralization”) are up to, in particular the
zNS
project (not much there yet, but the objective is clear at least).
It’s not all
bad news
apparently. While
one activity
of the W3C treats
N^2 integration complexity
as a selling point, a
new one
fights hard against it. Talk about split-brained!
IMO, before any new WG is chartered at the W3C,
the objective of that WG should be validated for architectural consistency
with the Web (you know, the thing it’s trying to
lead to its full potential?).
Here we have a WG whose
primary objective is to produce a spec which will, prima facie based upon its
charter,
violate a key architecture principle (what, it’s just “good practice”?) of the Web;
identify things with URIs.
How can you get any more architecturally inconsistent than that?
I’m not upset, I’m just confused. How has it gone this far?
Mass hysteria
should not be an excuse. It’s a good thing that OASIS seems to have done the bulk of
of the WS-* heavy lifting, leaving just four
at the W3C. But that’s three (SOAP is goodness)
too many, and it could have been much worse for the W3C.
Anyhow, best of luck Mark,
you’re gonna need it.
Update: just noticed
this comment from Jorgen;
As they say, “You can’t finish unless you start”.
Unless you’re finished before you start, of course.
One of the nice things about being a
critic of the current approach to Web services, is that the
infighting amoungst the players had a chilling effect on
standardization efforts, which made my job – of keeping the
W3C as free from this stuff as possible – easier. Unfortunately, today,
everybody seems to have come together for the worst spec of them all;
WS-Addressing
is now a W3C submission.
SOAP, I liked very much, just not how people
were/are using it.
WSDL, I didn’t like because of the bad practice it
encouraged, but I felt that it might have a role to play.
But this monstrosity actively causes harm by not using URIs as EPRs. That part of
the spec has no
redeeming qualities, except that it represents an attempt on behalf of the
authors to Do The Right Thing regarding addressing (i.e. standardize it).
Unfortunately, those authors fail to recognize that we’ve already got a
perfectly good identification spec.
Update; P.S. yes, I understand than an EPR has a mandatory wsa:Address, but that
doesn’t change anything, as any identifying information in the SOAP envelope is
necessarily in conflict with the HTTP Request-URI. One endpoint per message, please.
Wow, what’s the record for most minority opinions on one W3C TR? Three were submitted today.
(
link) [
Mark Baker’s Bookmarks]
This makes some sense, but ouch, they should have gone to the Atom community first.
(
link) [
Mark Baker’s Bookmarks]
Ok, fess up, who
pissed in Chris’ coffee
this morning?
I think the operative word from my blog that Chris missed was “need”; that,
IMO, we need a WS-* RSS feed because new specs are appearing at a crazy rate.
You can’t compare that with the W3C’s TR page and corresponding RSS feed
because it represents deltas while the Wiki represents a sigma. If the W3C
published a list of recommendations via
RSS, that would make for a more fair comparison. So how many Recs have they
published? Let’s see, in almost 10 years, they’ve got about 80 (90ish if you
include the IETF specs), while there’s 40ish Web services specs listed on the
Wiki, the bulk of which have been produced in the past two or three years. Not
exactly apples-to-apples, but not too far from it.
He concludes;
Please don’t misunderstand my intent, I like HTTP. Unlike Mark, neither do I think it is the last protocol we’ll ever need (it is not), nor do I spend every waking moment trying to tear it down or to poke fun at things that it simply doesn’t handle effectively. That would be pointless.
Please don’t misunderstand my intent, I like SOAP. I just don’t
like how it’s being used. It would best used for document exchange, not RPC (Web
services circa 1999-2002), or RPC dressed to look like document exchange (present
day Web services). I also don’t “poke fun” at Web services very often,
but I do take pride in being able to point out their many architectural
flaws in a variety of different ways, which I do frequently. And I don’t think HTTP
is “the last protocol we’ll ever need”, though I do believe that if it suddenly became
impossible to create any more, that it wouldn’t be such a big deal, at least for
those of us building document exchange based Internet scale integration solutions. As
for what things HTTP “simply doesn’t handle effectively”, I believe you grossly
overestimate the number of items in that list, though clearly it’s non-empty.
So do me a favour and drop the strawmen, ok? You’ve been pulling that
crap for years.
… this
gem from Roy;
If this thing is going to be called Web Services, then I insist that
it actually have something to do with the Web. If not, I’d rather
have the WS-I group responsible for abusing the marketplace with yet
another CORBA/DCOM than have the W3C waste its effort pandering to
the whims of marketing consultants, have a look at hoe
branding on social media can help your business grow. I am not here to accommodate the
requirements of mass hysteria.
And the
hysteria continues…
Hint; anytime you need an
RSS feed
to track new specs, something is, prima facie, horribly, horribly, wrong.