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Lies, Damn Lies, and XML

February 7, 2003 12:58:09.839

This is priceless:

Tag Soup RDF lets you create statements that the document/author made, that you or anyone else has made. The lies can be categorized and pruned to your or anyone elses whim. I really hope no one or at least very few, will ever have to manually produce RDF/XML. If you're a programmer use a library, if you're not use an application. If you want to write it yourself it's just like code or English - if it doesn't parse it can't be understood. Responses:
  1. "Don't worry your little head about it, we'll build you programs to hide this horrific syntax from you." I've heard that before. Actually, I've heard a lot of it. Categorize under "engineers will save us".
  2. Your RSS feed does not validate as RSS. Your feed (RSS 0.91, no less) is auto-generated by Blogger Pro, a closed source tool which you can't customize. Categorize under "tools will save us".
  3. While we're on the subject of validation, your HTML doesn't validate either. Some of these errors are under your control (unescaped ampersands in links), others not (invalid HTML in the Blogspot-inserted banner ad). Lucky for you, my browser has been specially designed to work around errors like this and parse and display the rest of your page as best it can.
  4. I tried to contact you privately, but neither your site nor your RSS feed contain any sort of machine-readable contact information. No doubt in an attempt to cut down on abuse by spammers. Categorize under "metadata will save us".
  5. Your site does link to a web-based contact form, which is broken. I give up.
Ouch. I hope I'm never a target of Mark's. Go see his post for all the links.

Comments

Untitled

[] February 8, 2003 3:11:04.359

He was wrong about 5. It works fine.

The joys of RDF

[Holger Kleinsorgen] February 8, 2003 4:02:37.493

I recently added RDF import/export to an application, and was astonished how someone could make up such a random specification. They made the same error like the SGML guys and allowed flexible formulation of facts. A large part of the W3 spec deal with alternative ways of writing the same facts. This is bad because - no non-geek will ever want to write RDF with a text editor - these flexibilities make creating/parsing RDF hard I tried several RDF tools as wells, and each tool seems to have a different understanding of what is valid RDF and what is not.

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