{"id":188,"date":"2003-10-09T21:31:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-10T01:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/?p=125"},"modified":"2003-10-09T21:31:00","modified_gmt":"2003-10-10T01:31:00","slug":"xml-or-rdf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2003\/10\/xml-or-rdf\/","title":{"rendered":"XML or RDF?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.w3.org\/Archives\/Public\/www-rdf-comments\/2003JulSep\/0358.html\">proposal of mine<\/a>\nwas recently\n<a href=\"http:\/\/lists.w3.org\/Archives\/Public\/www-rdf-comments\/2003OctDec\/0033.html\">accepted<\/a> by the\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2001\/sw\/RDFCore\/\">RDF Core WG<\/a>\nwhich IMO, will help explain what RDF is for to a lot of people who\ndon&#8217;t yet understand the important role it plays in the World Wide Web\nproject.  I believe this because I&#8217;ve used the RDF it permits, to\nsuccessfully explain what RDF adds over vanilla XML to Exec types.<\/p>\n\n<p>Consider the following.  Is it XML or RDF?<\/p>\n\n<pre>\n&lt;Person xmlns=\"http:\/\/example.org\/foofoo\/\"&gt;\n  &lt;name&gt;Mark Smith&lt;\/name&gt;\n  &lt;age&gt;55&lt;\/age&gt;\n&lt;\/Person&gt;\n<\/pre>\n\n<p>Answer?  It&#8217;s both.  Depending upon which media type it&#8217;s described\nwith, it means different things.<\/p>\n\n<p>To an XML application that isn&#8217;t hardcoded to know about that language,\nit&#8217;s an almost entirely opaque blob, except for the namespace.<\/p>\n\n<p>To an RDF\/XML application that isn&#8217;t hardcoded to know about that language,\nit knows what the XML app knows, <em>plus<\/em>;<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>that there exists a resource of type &#8220;http:\/\/example.org\/foofoo\/Person&#8221;\nsomeplace, with properties &#8220;http:\/\/example.org\/foofoo\/name&#8221; and\n&#8220;http:\/\/example.org\/foofoo\/age&#8221; with those values<\/li>\n<li>that additional properties can be added without impacting the meaning\nof the former interpretation, i.e. potentially breaking some application\nsomewhere.  An XML app can&#8217;t assume this; it might be breaking its validity\nagainst some schema someplace<\/li>\n<li>various other possible syntactic additions or modifications which can be\nused to extend the current semantics in a backwards compatible way, if desired.\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>This is the value of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/NOTE-webarch-extlang#Requirements\">partial understanding<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A proposal of mine was recently accepted by the RDF Core WG which IMO, will help explain what RDF is for to a lot of people who don&#8217;t yet understand the important role it plays in the World Wide Web project. I believe this because I&#8217;ve used the RDF it permits, to successfully explain what [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-xml"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}