Saturday, October 18, 2003
About two months or more ago I decided to give up following that which is now named Atom. It was born with fire, energy and drive and had turned into mud debating what name it should have. Of all things.
At the beginning of October it was finally decided to call it Atom.
And now I want to know about whether it’s in RDF format (or very close) or not (I know that it was incredibly close at one stage, via a comment Aaron Swartz made somewhere).
The list of pages beginning with R on the wiki lists eight pages all about RDF, inlcluding one illuminatingly called No To RDF but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to get an answer from. Mark Pilgrim’s latest piece on xml.com about the Atom API appears to demonstrate that it’s not (Danny Ayers and Russell Beattie should be careful when reading the comments, they may need to turn a blogger off).
What do the RDF people have to say about this? I tried looking at Danny’s Atom weblog but I didn’t seem to get very far – I tried to go back to the first entry he made and work my way forward, but there doesn’t seem to be any way of accessing an archive index, and there’s no search functionality. I could trawl through mailing lists but there’s no guarantee that after several hours I’d have found the definitive answer, so I shan’t bother.
I know that Sjoerd Visscher wrote an XR transformation for Atom->RDF:
Sam Ruby made an XSLT tranformation from Atom to RDF. He said it was hard to do. On the #echo IRC channel I said that XR would probably make it a lot easier. Then Sam asked me to make an XR transformation that would do the same thing. I did, and here it is.
and I know that the latest spec is here but I am an RDF novice. The differences and difficulties need pointing out to me, on a postcard if you want.
Someone, anyone. I don't care how you get here, just, get here if you can.