Why RDF

Last night I implemented trackback auto-discovery in Syncato. Trackback auto-discovery uses RDF to embed meta-data into HTML pages. I know this is what RDF is supposed to be for, but it just bugs me to see something so simple obfuscated like this. Now each page has some gunk like this in it.

<!--<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">

<rdf:Description 
        rdf:about="http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/713?t=item"
        dc:identifier="http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/713?t=item"
        dc:title="Clay Shirky on the Semantic Web"         
	trackback:ping="http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK//Trackback/713"/>
</rdf:RDF>-->

All that just to tell someone what URL they should ping. Seems to me something like this would be just as good.

<trackback-ping url="http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK//Trackback/713"/>

Using XML for this would have been simple, clean and would have made the reason behind this much easier to understand for casual users. RDF just obscures the real purpose and makes it look much more complicated then it is. Also since this is embedded meta-data within the page there's not even any actual loss of information. The RDF triples could still be extracted if someone really wants them. Pointless complexity. Oh well, water under the bridge, it works.

What's also kind of bizarre is that for all that XML and RDF machinery, Movabletype just uses regular expressions to extract the information. This means that Movabletype won't support anything other then those specific namespace prefixes. Definitely not the way it's supposed to work.

Posted by Kimbro Staken