- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2015 13:03:02 -0400
- To: public-lod@w3.org
Side note: RDF/XML was the first RDF serialization standardized, over 15 years ago, at a time when XML was all the buzz. Since then other serializations have been standardized that are far more human friendly to read and write, and easier for programmers to use, such as Turtle and JSON-LD. However, even beyond ease of use, one of the biggest problems with RDF/XML that I and others have seen over the years is that it misleads people into thinking that RDF is a dialect of XML, and it is not. I'm sure this misconception was reinforced by the unfortunate depiction of XML in the foundation of the (now infamous) semantic web layer cake of 2001, which in hindsight is just plain wrong: http://www.w3.org/2001/09/06-ecdl/slide17-0.html (Admittedly JSON-LD may run a similar risk, but I think that risk is mitigated now by the fact that RDF is already more established in its own right.) I encourage all RDF publishers to use one of the other standard RDF formats such as Turtle or JSON-LD. All commonly used RDF tools now support Turtle, and many or most already support JSON-LD. RDF/XML is not officially deprecated, but I personally hope that in the next round of RDF updates, we will quietly thank RDF/XML for its faithful service and mark it as deprecated. David Booth
Received on Thursday, 3 September 2015 17:03:30 UTC