Hacker News Reader

Comment by joelhaus | Hacker News Reader

Is this a widely held view? I'd like to understand the logic, so a reference would be appreciated.

If a suitable standard exists, you would think they'd take advantage of it (increased adoption), no? I also don't like the idea of duplicating efforts, but apparently I have missed some technical limitation.

[Edit] I think I just found the part of the answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283507.

View on HN

Is this a widely held view? I'd like to understand the logic, so a reference would be appreciated.

Are you referring to the "RDF sucks" bit? Yes, I think it is a widely held view, which often people are too scared to express.

Here's a decent reference: http://norman.walsh.name/2004/07/30/rdfxml

(Norm Walsh is the chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group and co-chair of the XML Core Working Group, so he does have some kind of grasp of how XML is supposed to work)

Yes, lots of people who like RDF dislike the RDF/XML serialization of it. It's ridiculously verbose, hard to process with XML tools, not very human-readable, and there can be many equally valid RDF/XML serializations for any given RDF graph.

N3 is much more widely liked - http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer - as is RDFa - http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/

This is why it's always good to hang around people smarter than you are. Thanks for all of the great replies.

I think their open graph protocol is a little simpler and easier to use than rdf/microformats -- I think they were aiming for simplicity over completeness. You can represent pretty complicated structured data with rdf/microformats. Sometimes simplicity wins over completeness. See http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com