Interview with Tim Bray on XML, RDF, etc.
Tim Bray was one of the original developers of XML
and the person who also worked with Guha to XMLify
the Meta-Content Facility (MCF) to become RDF. His
current job at Sun is working on the XML formats for
OpenOffice. He discusses those and related issues
in the following interview:
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=printer_friendly&pid=282&page=1
A Conversation with Tim Bray
In the 1980s, Tim had been the director of the
OED project at the University of Waterloo, where
they converted the OED to GML (IBM's predecessor
to SGML, which I had been using since the 1970s).
GML was standardized as SGML, and Bray joined the
group that developed XML from SGML.
I very much agree with Bray about two important
points:
1. The use of XML for OpenOffice is an excellent
application. As he modestly says, "that is sort
of like the canonical example of what we thought
we were building XML for. It’s a super-clever
data format. An Open Office document is actually
a Zip file, with different XML streams in it: one
for the payload data, one for the style sheet, and
one for all the various things that go around the
document. Absolutely, remarkably clever."
2. About RDF, he admits "But, boy, there are problems.
The XML serialization of RDF is horrible; it’s
a botched job."
For more comments about RDF from Tim Bray, see his web site:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet
The RDF.net Challenge
John Sowa