Year: 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Debate is not a game one plays when one is bored or has little else to do. Debate is a way of people trying to understand each other’s point of view. At the least, it is a way of discussing points of view for an audience in order to convince members of that audience to follow one course or another. Debate, when practiced at its best, is a celebration of differences.

In this previous post I responded, many times, to questions and concerns about RDF and RDF/XML raised by people such as Mark Pilgrim and Joe Gregorio. Was I patient? I hope I was. I tried to be. Was I accurate? As accurate as I could be. Did I convince anyone? Unknown. At the very least, though, I had hoped that I had argued well and that my rather extensive efforts were met with respect.

Imagine how disappointing then when I visit Joe’s weblog and find that he’s posted a new note about this discussion and quotes everyone in the debate but myself, though most of the quotes he uses were a result of my own discussion.

By ignoring me I have effectively been removed from the debate, my efforts dismissed. I have been reduced.

It is too easy in weblogging to reduce each other. Too easy to dismiss each other. To easy to ignore that which we just don’t want to hear, and manipulate that which we don’t want to ignore.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This week, the RDF Working Group released drafts of six working documents for the RDF specification. Six. That’s a whole lot of work. However, rather than getting a pat on the back with a quiet “Well done.”, the group has seen their effort catechized mercilessly.

Joe Gregorio chronicles Tim Bray’s half-hearted attempt to model RDDL using RDF/XML — a syntax that Bray has vocally opposed in the past. This leads into a chain of RDF bashing at the W3C Tag (Technical Architecture Group) mailing list. Bob DuCharme and John Cowan write an article for xml.com, Make your XML RDF-Friendly, and this led into a great deal of RDF bashing over at the xml.org mailing list.

I responded at the W3C RDF Comments mailing list and at the xml.org mailing list.

At xml.org, I wrote:

I’ve watched with interest the discussion about RDF within this list and over at the W3C Technical Architecture Group (seeded by this item from Tim Bray — link). What puzzles and confuses me is why there is so much animosity towards RDF.

If you don’t understand it, and don’t want to take the time to understand it, or don’t feel it will buy you anything, or hate the acronym, or you’re in a general bitchy mood that’s easily triggered if someone uses “Semantic” in the same sentence that contains “Web”, the solution is simple: don’t use it. Don’t use it. Don’t study it, look at it, listen about it, work with it, sleep with it, or generally go out and dance late at night with it.

I also wrote:

Is it fashionable to be _down_ on RDF? Sort of like the techie equivalent of
not wearing white after Labor Day unless you live in Australia?

I am particularly unhappy because of Tim Bray’s involvement in all of this. There’s an implication and an assumption made that because Tim Bray ‘invented’ XML, he’s qualified to be a definitive judge of RDF and RDF/XML. However, the two efforts are not the same: XML deals with meta-language, RDF with meta-data. Tim has a right to his opinion, and I don’t fault him for it though I don’t have a tremendous amount of respect for his half-hearted and rather dubious effort to use RDF/XML to model RDDL.

What does concern me is the reaction of people to Tim’s efforts and his pronouncements on the “badness” of RDF. Should I give up on RDF and the existing RDF/XML serialization technique just because Tim Bray doesn’t care for it? Am I forced to defer to him in all things XML?

Sorry, but I don’t think so. In the past I’ve not allowed other “inventors” to tell me how to do things, I’m not about to start with Tim Bray and RDF.

Bottom line, there is a group of people who spent a lot of time and effort and energy resolving issues related to RDF, and writing the new specifications; and there is an even larger group of people who spent a lot of time and effort creating the associated tools and APIs I use, and gladly. This week, if no one else will take a moment, one moment, to thank them for their effort, I will.

Thanks, folks. You done good.