dan brickley on xml, rdf, tools

[Bruce D'Arcus <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us>]

Just an FYI link I remember from awhile back (which was related to 
conversations about ODF actually); good summary of the issues with RDF 
profiles, XML, tools.

<http://danbri.org/words/2005/09/28/137>

An excerpt (which is in fact directly related to the ODF questions):

> A good question to ask here, is how much we’d gain from dropping the 
> more esoteric syntactic variations. Imagine for example a syntactic 
> profile of RDF/XML in which rdf:RDF was never needed, rdf:type and 
> literals were never represented as attributes, node elements always 
> (or never!) carried a type, and rdf:nodeID was only used when 
> absolutely (how to define this?) necessary. I still suspect that there 
> would be plenty of variation, because the fundamental practice 
> wouldn’t change. We’d be representing unordered graph data over an 
> ordered tree.
>
> My take: custom syntactic profiles, ones designed for some particular 
> community and purpose have a role. We can define them as RDF/XML 
> subsets (in Relax-NG, Schematron or prose), or as non-RDF XML formats, 
> transformable with GRDDL. Either approach makes life somewhat easier 
> for those working with XML tools, at some cost to those in an RDF 
> environment. But we should also stop looking over our shoulder at XML. 
> RDF/XML is painful for XML developers because they find themselves 
> lacking familiar tools when working with RDF.

Bruce