Re: [xri] XRD feedback from Scott

[Joseph Anthony Pasquale Holsten <joseph.holsten@cordance.net>]

Scott Cantor supposedly wrote:
> Joseph Anthony Pasquale Holsten wrote on 2009-05-27:
>> Though that sounds confusingly similar to RDF.
> I did, umm, ask that question...doesn't RDF already do this kind of  
> stuff?

Sure, but RDF's quite a bit more powerful and complicated. You can  
also build theorem provers, relational DBs, &c with it. It's just not  
very easy to use.

For example, a project similar to XRD is POWDER. While in XRD you  
query with a relation to get a set of URIs (I've got a phone, who can  
I call?), in POWDER you query with a URI to get of relations (I need  
someone named Smith, can I call one?).  They wanted to have an RDF  
notation so they can infer from the POWDER record. I wouldn't put  
POWDER against XRD in a beauty contest, but compare regular POWDER  
against the generated RDF in their Formal Semantics spec sometime.  
POWDER is a few orders of magnitude easier to read than POWDER-S  
because they built a high-level language in XML and transform it into  
low level RDF.

The trouble is trying to store everything in primitive data structures  
without providing any powerful abstraction to deal with it. Kind of  
like trying to use lisp without macros, lambdas, or eval. Unless  
you've got nothing better to do, I'd advise against it.

I've been working on an informal vocab to transform XRD into RDF, but  
it's not very fun to use either.

>> [...] why not say Expires: MUST match or MUST NOT be present. Seems  
>> like there might be caching considerations too.
>
> Yes, that's a good point, but by saying it has to match, you end up  
> creating a condition that has to be tested in the implementation, so  
> I think it's simpler just to ignore the HTTP layer there.

Sounds fine. But if it's going to be ignored, then they SHOULD NOT set  
Expires: or anything else we have to ignore. Otherwise someone's going  
to tear their hear out while debugging, trying to understand what  
idiot explicitly broke compat w/ HTTP, until they find just that line  
in XRD.

Joseph Holsten