Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Dorothea received an email from Simon St. Laurent, the editor of my RDF book. I appreciate her respect for Simon and match it with considerable respect of my own, which will cause him no end of discomfort, I’m sure. However, I have to push back at the sentence:
But Simon really is cool, one of the sadly few voices for document-oriented XML howling in the vast wilderness of C2C (computer-to-computer) dataheads.
It is the C2C ‘dataheads’ that ensure that XML documents don’t document crap for all of their cleanliness and pristine eloquence. It is the C2C ‘dataheads’ that provide the proofs behind the seemingly simple XML vocabularies to ensure that the data documented within them is always consistent and reliable. And it is this particular C2C datahead that spent several days this last week locked in debate, difficult debate, with members of the RDF Working Group, the XML community, the weblogging community, and others, trying my best to ensure that I understand the concerns of the non-RDF community; that RDF/XML is as simple as it can be, or work with the XML community to come up with a feasible alternative; that the RDF specification documents are comprehensive and clear; and that I understand the concepts and semantics of RDF well enough that I may write cleanly about them. Perhaps even clean enough for the D2D markup heads.
Of course, this was a lot more work than writing out “RDF/XML sucks”. I think next time I won’t go through this effort. When someone says, “RDF/XML sucks”, I’ll respond with “No it doesn’t” and leave it at that.