5 ms·

Is there a reason they chose not to use rdf/microformats? This is their proprietary FBML markup, I believe. Seems a little redundant, but maybe I missed someth

Is there a reason they chose not to use rdf/microformats? This is their proprietary FBML markup, I believe. Seems a little redundant, but maybe I missed something.

nl 17y ago
Is there a reason they chose not to use rdf/microformats? Because RDF sucks? And microformats only help in some cases This is their proprietary FBML markup, I believe It looks a lot like JSON to me. What are you looking at?
- joelhaus 17y ago
  Is this a widely held view? I'd like to understand the logic, so a reference would be appreciated. If a suitable standard exists, you would think they'd take advantage of it (increased adoption), no? I also don't like the idea of duplicating efforts, but apparently I have missed some technical limitation. [Edit] I think I just found the part of the answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283507 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283507.
  - veemjeem 17y ago
    I think their open graph protocol is a little simpler and easier to use than rdf/microformats -- I think they were aiming for simplicity over completeness. You can represent pretty complicated structured data with rdf/microformats. Sometimes simplicity wins over completeness. See http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
  - nl 17y ago
    Is this a widely held view? I'd like to understand the logic, so a reference would be appreciated. Are you referring to the "RDF sucks" bit? Yes, I think it is a widely held view, which often people are too scared to express. Here's a decent reference: http://norman.walsh.name/2004/07/30/rdfxml http://norman.walsh.name/2004/07/30/rdfxml (Norm Walsh is the chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group and co-chair of the XML Core Working Group, so he does have some kind of grasp of how XML is supposed to work)
  - inigo 17y ago
    Yes, lots of people who like RDF dislike the RDF/XML serialization of it. It's ridiculously verbose, hard to process with XML tools, not very human-readable, and there can be many equally valid RDF/XML serializations for any given RDF graph. N3 is much more widely liked - http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer - as is RDFa - http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
    - joelhaus 17y ago
      This is why it's always good to hang around people smarter than you are. Thanks for all of the great replies.
_pius 17y ago
They did use RDF ... RDFa.

Is there a reason they chose not to use rdf/microformats? This is their proprietary FBML markup, I believe. Seems a little redundant, but maybe I missed something.

nl 17y ago

Is there a reason they chose not to use rdf/microformats? Because RDF sucks? And microformats only help in some cases This is their proprietary FBML markup, I believe It looks a lot like JSON to me. What are you looking at?

joelhaus 17y ago
Is this a widely held view? I'd like to understand the logic, so a reference would be appreciated. If a suitable standard exists, you would think they'd take advantage of it (increased adoption), no? I also don't like the idea of duplicating efforts, but apparently I have missed some technical limitation. [Edit] I think I just found the part of the answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283507 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283507.
- veemjeem 17y ago
  I think their open graph protocol is a little simpler and easier to use than rdf/microformats -- I think they were aiming for simplicity over completeness. You can represent pretty complicated structured data with rdf/microformats. Sometimes simplicity wins over completeness. See http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
- nl 17y ago
  Is this a widely held view? I'd like to understand the logic, so a reference would be appreciated. Are you referring to the "RDF sucks" bit? Yes, I think it is a widely held view, which often people are too scared to express. Here's a decent reference: http://norman.walsh.name/2004/07/30/rdfxml http://norman.walsh.name/2004/07/30/rdfxml (Norm Walsh is the chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group and co-chair of the XML Core Working Group, so he does have some kind of grasp of how XML is supposed to work)
- inigo 17y ago
  Yes, lots of people who like RDF dislike the RDF/XML serialization of it. It's ridiculously verbose, hard to process with XML tools, not very human-readable, and there can be many equally valid RDF/XML serializations for any given RDF graph. N3 is much more widely liked - http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer - as is RDFa - http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
  - joelhaus 17y ago
    This is why it's always good to hang around people smarter than you are. Thanks for all of the great replies.

_pius 17y ago

They did use RDF ... RDFa.