I was watching, and enjoying, Ben Hammersley strutting his stuff in his RDF presentation (.mov), and then I read Adam Bosworth:
I think Danny's equally correct observation in the comment on this blog that it would be easier to reason about data if data were of this form is a case of desire obscuring judgement, something we all know something about at some point in our lives. I've spent my life working with normal customers and with normal programmers. And it is my considered and thoughtful judgement that while the concept underlying RDF is simple, even brilliantly simple, it isn't how most of us think about data. In short, while it is simple, it isn't intuitive. Secondly, when transcribed into XML I think it can quickly become downright prolix. This sometimes happens. Expressions, if turned into some sort of XML in fix parse tree, are unreadable. Why do I think this? Because, quite simply, when I read it I get confused and when I read RSS 2.0 I don't. One seems clear. The other seems filled with namespaces and RDF:abouts and so on. However, this is one case where I hope I'm wrong and Danny and Tim Berners-Lee are right. It would be wonderful if we could effortlessly reason about all the data on the web. Only time will tell.
