News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPub and XML on the Web.

Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by Ixiaus on Sunday January 30, 2011 @04:17PM (#2159208)
XML is not a failure and it's also not a failure on the web (XHTML? RDF? FOAF? &c... huge successes). OpenID also isn't a failure - it could stand to be supplanted by something better but it had to start somewhere.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by halo on Sunday January 30, 2011 @04:29PM (#2159236)
>XHTML? RDF? FOAF? &c... huge successes

You're kidding, right?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by Ixiaus on Sunday January 30, 2011 @05:43PM (#2159412)
No I'm not. What in my tone makes you think I'm kidding? Could you please provide a counter argument instead of a flame bait comment?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by beaumartinez on Sunday January 30, 2011 @07:00PM (#2159631)
XHTML hasn't revolutionised web page markup (it brought with it draconian changes {read: made web page markup more XML-like} and is now being replaced by HTML5, which makes some {all?} of its changes irrelevant).

RDF isn't as widespread as it could be (it could be used in Facebook and Wikipedia but isn't, for example).

(And I haven't even heard of FOAF.)

I wouldn't call these huge successes.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by Ixiaus on Sunday January 30, 2011 @07:12PM (#2159660)
XHTML has revolutionized page markup. Not because everyone is using it but because it blazed the path for better standards that the other document types follow. Also, many of the changes in XHTML were brought over to HTML5 - which does have an XML definition.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by yuhong on Monday January 31, 2011 @02:22AM (#2160628)
"Also, many of the changes in XHTML were brought over to HTML5 - which does have an XML definition."

Yea, the so-called XHTML5 that will be finally supported in IE9, BTW.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by j_baker on Sunday January 30, 2011 @07:39PM (#2159727)
Just out of curiosity, what is an example of a draconian change that was added by XHTML?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by simonw on Sunday January 30, 2011 @09:04PM (#2159964)
If you're properly serving XHTML 1.1, you're supposed to use the application/xhtml+xml Content-Type, which means browsers are supposed to FAIL to render the page if there are any well-formedness erors.

It turns out that's a really bad idea on the Web.

Further reading: http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by evgen on Sunday January 30, 2011 @06:59PM (#2159628)
I guess reality is the best counter argument to your claims. RDF does not exist outside of academic toys and FOAF is so statistically irrelevant that it can easily be said that it never really existed in the first place. As the original article points out, XML may have a place in certain forms of document exchange, but as far as the web is concerned it is mostly just one failure after another.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by Ixiaus on Sunday January 30, 2011 @07:08PM (#2159650)
FOAF is irrelevant in many respects, I'll give you that; but, RDF certainly does exist outside of academic toys.

Big names that I know of that use/publish RDF:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/07/the_world_cup...

http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/RDF

http://richard.cyganiak.de/blog/2009/10/linked-data-at-the-n...

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/SciVerse-Hub-Appl...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evri

[EDIT] Don't forget DBpedia and FreeBase (which uses RDF heavily) is used heavily by PowerSet which subsequently was bought by Microsoft which now (as far as I know) is used heavily for Bing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by simonw on Sunday January 30, 2011 @09:06PM (#2159970)
Freebase wasn't built around RDF - they ended up emitting RDF because it made sense to do so, but the core APIs the service is built on are based around JSON, not RDF.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPu... by halo on Monday January 31, 2011 @07:07PM (#2163777)
I don't see how anyone could regard those technologies as huge successes. All three would be in my list of technologies which were overhyped and hugely underdelivered.

XHTML was a failure. Everyone stuck with HTML4 and advantages of XHTML haven't materialised. I question the whole reasoning behind trying to retrofit HTML into XML.

The "semantic web" has never delivered on its promises, despite hanging around like a bad smell. Very few sites use RDF (or FOAF). The real-world problems that RDF was supposed to solve are, in practice, solved by simple JSON-based Web APIs.

The only XML-based web technology to become a success is RSS.

[ Parent | on HN ]