Category: Semantics

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.

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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.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There’s now an associated RSS feed with weblogs.com. With this, aggregators could check the feed to know when to poll an individual weblog RSS feed. On the face, this sounds good: stop all that polling and all those hits to our RSS files. However, the problem with this approach is that it’s centralizing what is now a decentralized service.

Centralization means becoming dependent on one service for new information. If the service goes down, you would then need to make sure your aggregator reverts back to the old polling procedure.

There’s a second problem to centralization – control. If one organization controls the RSS feed, there’s nothing to stop that organization filtering weblogs – and the RSS feeds associated with the weblogs. The issue of weblogs.com being filtered has been discussed here before.

Finally, a third problem: As it is, I have to wait too long for the trackback and whatever pings to occur when I do an update to my weblog. Yet another ‘ping’ is just an annoyance. I’d rather just have well behaved aggregators that only check every hour.

Better, yet: I’d rather have you all click the blogroll entry with my name on it – it’s B-u-r-n-i-n-g-b-i-r-d in case you’ve forgotten – and wait with a smile of anticipation on your face as my page loads, rubbing your hands together in excitement. Kind of like a kid opening a present during the holidays. Think of this weblog wrapped in a bow if it helps.

And this approach can’t be spammed, hacked, or broken.

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If you’re a Movable Type user and are using the templates provided with the new RSS Validator, be aware of the following line:

 

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]></content:encoded>

 

This will include your entire post within the feed. I didn’t pay that much attention to the template or the generated output until this weekend when News is Free started pulling in photos from one of my stories. I don’t mind News is Free accessing the photos or reproducing the entire essay, but I imagine that it slowed their page loads, as well as added to my bandwidth use.

And I’ve never liked the concept of full posts showing up in aggregators. Never have. Never will. If people can’t do with just the excerpts then that’s just too bloody bad.

I’ve since removed this line from both templates. The generated results still validate. You might also remove the content namespace declaration too (though I wouldn’t worry about that unless you’re comfortable mucking around in RSS or RDF).

Update Two other discussions related to this issue in the Neighborhood: Shannon and Phil.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby created an RSS Validator for us to use to validate our RSS feeds, and Bill Kearney was kind enough to host it. Many appreciations, folks.

I ran the Validator against my RSS feeds (both Userland RSS and RDF/RSS feeds) per Mark’s request and as I expected my Userland RSS feed didn’t work, being the old buggy Movable Type .91 RSS rather than the sparkly new RSS 2.0. I thought to myself that one out of two ain’t bad and was going to blow off the result. However, I knew that if I didn’t fix it, some dark and stormy night a Python bot would loom out of the darkness and beat the you-know-what out of my bad RSS file.

Speaking of bandwidth, my bandwidth usage so far this month is over 19 GB – not because of RSS feeds but because of the photos I embed in so many of my writings. That slashdot thing accounted for much of it. I think for the Parable of the Languages sequel , “Babble Meadow: Return of the Markup”, I’ll use a few less photos.

Second Update Phil calls Sam, Mark, and Bill a cabal. I like that. I like that a lot. The RSS Cabal. I think Sam, Mark, and Bill should put that into their weblogs somewhere. And I think Phil should include himself. And let’s throw Joe, Ben and Morbus in for good measure.

The RSS Cabal – sounds both scary and sexy. Black leather meets high tech.

Third Update There’s something to be said for small groups. The RSS Validator is already on its 1.03 release and it just released today.

Scenario:

 

Mark: Shelley found a bug.

Sam: Well, okay. What do you want me to do about it?

Mark: Can you fix it?

Sam: Sure.

Mark: Well, okay.

Sam: Okay

Mark (calling over shoulder): Bill, we’re going to be putting up a new release!

Bill: (From a distance) What?

Mark: (louder) WE’RE GOING TO PUT UP A NEW RELEASE.

Bill: WELL, OKAY.

Mark: Okay.

Mark: (Typing into computer) Version 1.02 is out. Fixes…