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A New Data Model for the Web
An anonymous reader writes "Adam Bosworth delivered what
could be considered a seminal lecture (mp3) at the last MySQL conference about a new data model
for the web, why the plain HTML web succeeded, and why XQuery or the
Semantic web are failures. He is emphatic that RSS 2.0/Atom are the
next big thing and represent the new data model for the web. The audio
is rather long at forty plus minutes and there are a few
places
where the
talk has been covered."
He is emphatic that RSS 2.0/Atom are the next big thing and represent the new data model for the web.
Here's the thing: RSS 2.0 and Atom really don't have a revolutionary data model. They are just file formats that list short descriptions, in a sequential order, with a bit of meta data, that get polled on a regular interval. That's all.
They are only popular because the use pattern is different to normal web pages. The tech itself is pretty mundane. Internet Explorer 4.0 has something similar with "channels", way back in the 90s.
You could have done the same thing with a subset of HTML 2.0 in the 90s. The main reasons people didn't is because they didn't think of it and the need wasn't as great.
The Semantic Web, on the other hand, is doing new stuff. Some of it we don't know how to do yet. Some of it is immediately practical, some of it isn't. The Semantic Web is more of an idea than a tangible product.
By saying that RSS and Atom somehow "beat" the Semantic Web, he's comparing apples to oranges. It just doesn't make sense.
The reason the web took off so well was because it was built from a few simple principles that could be generalised. Resources that could be addressed. Simple, text-based markup. Simple, text-based protocol.
The Semantic Web will probably take off in the same way, with various bits already being used to varying degrees of success (e.g. Mozilla already uses RDF). But it's a much bigger problem, so expecting it to take off just as quickly is naive.