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by PaulHoule
1459 days ago
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People get seduced by specifications that don't really specify anything. Conversely there is a lot of pushback against W3C standards because they are specific and unfortunately people don't see that at freedom (freedom to choose tools that interoperate) and don't see the slavery in being stuck with poorly specified "standards" that are controlled by one entity. GraphQL is improved (we almost know what the algebra is) but originally it was an asymmetric specification meant to keep power in the hands of Facebook. That is, they didn't want to specify what the exact rules for traversing the graph are because they have commercial reasons for controlling what information you can get plus some responsibility to protect user's privacy. Schema.org was another asymmetric standard, as it wasn't particularly good for exposing semantic metadata that people could consume as such (it took me a few years to really figure out how) but it was great for companies like Google to make a training set that would ultimately let them extract entities from documents that aren't marked up. It achieved some popularity because there is no limit to the hoops people will jump through if it improves their SERP rating from 78 to 55. |
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Like the RDF 1.1 Spec?[https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/]
The whole "abstract syntax" shenanigans that RDF pulls is one of its biggest flaws. It makes the entire ecosystem huge and unwieldy, and has little upsides besides giving everybody their favourite serialisation flavour.
It makes things like canonical representations for content addressable hashing and singing pretty much impossible, which is a huge detriment to proper authentication and provenance tracking.
It also pulls in all of these other open ended standards, where everything and anything is a valid subject identifier, so long as it's URI resolvable by http (which is pretty vague and random).
Subjects and predicates should have always just been 16byte random UIDs, which at the same time would have delivered us from the bane of blank nodes, endless discussions on predicate names, and broken links.
The object part should also have been limited in the amount of data it can hold, just hash anything bigger and store it in some form of content addressable blob store.