Curiouser and Curiouser!

I've created a page for people interested in beta testing liveTopics 1.1.3, please go add yourself if you want to get involved.

I've been having an agreeable chat with, among others, Danny Ayers about ENT, RDF, and ThreadsML.  Danny expressed some concerns about the dangers of re-inventing wheels.  I share his concern although our viewpoints are perhaps a little different.

I want to share part of one my messages:

My view is that RDF is a great way of doing things as long as it is wrapped with 1st rate tool support and matched with applications that warrant it. So far as I can tell both of those are near to non-existant right now and RDF remains primarily the domain of "those people who are interested in RDF and think it is a good idea," with a few exceptions.

Back when Paolo and I were tossing this idea around we carefully thought over "are we re-inventing RDF" and came to the answer: "no." ENT is, by comparison, pretty simple/limited compared to RDF. But right now I think simplicity is more valuable thanpower. We are still in the early stages of building the semantic web and, really, the applications we have don't *need* RDF's power right now. We think ENT is "just good enough" to launch a raft of exciting applications.

I fully expect though, that those applications will grow too big for ENT and simple "hard-wired" standards like it. But this demand will, perhaps, lead to an awakening about RDF. It's time will have come because there will be applications that justify it's complexity & the perceived benefits of those applications will be enough to overcome the inertia involved in getting started with it. And, hopefully, by that time the RDF folks will have delivered much more solidly on the tools front ;)

In short my belief is that simple, focused, standards now will pave the way for the adoption of more powerful standards later.

Also, as I have stated before, I don't think that RDF will really hit a home run until OWL is ready for prime-time. 

I'd like to publish the 2nd public draft of the ENT1.0 specification soon.  Today if I can.  There have been a couple of clarifications, a fix to the examples (thanks to Phil Pearson) and a couple of issues to be cleared up.

• The spec says that a topic ID must look like an XML NAME.  XML NAME is quite a restrictive set of characters and it looks like it wasn't such a good choice.  For example Tim Bray wants to use topic names like sports/baseball/NYMets and XML NAME won't let him do that (I personally don't agree with him about his topic, but that's okay).  He suggests using something from the Internationized Resource Identifer (IRI) specification because topic ID's are likely to end up as parts of URI's.  Good thinking Tim!  So, on this note, I propose changing the XML NAME defintion to IRI ifragment.  Does anyone have any comment about this?
  
• I have some concern that the use of namespaced attributes, e.g. <ent:cloud ent:href=""> instead of <ent:cloud href=""> may cause some people problems.  It's perfectly valid XML but people aren't used to seeing attributes in namespaces and it may prove to be confusing.  Since we are trying to keep ENT simple and since I don't think it will matter too much either way, I am considering dropping the namespace on the attributes.  Does anyone have any comment about this?

We look forward to your comments.

Pretty soon I will be displaying the new ENT 1.0 logo <%radio.macros.imageRef( "/images/rssent.gif" )%> (courtesy of Paolo) on this page as my feed is now compliant.