I don’t get it: XSLT, RDF, XQuery, XLinq

Posted December 23, 2005

It seems to me that I should like XSLT, be waxing philosophic about RDF and how it will be the future of everything, and be into XQuery (or at least XLINQ).

But in truth I don’t get any of them.

XSLT: It seems to me transformation is complex. It appears it requires a programming language. It strikes me I know a couple of those already. It strikes me that XSLT is yet another, and that I would rather use one I already use for everything else to do my transformation too.

It’s just odd to suddenly jump into a weird XML dialect to do transformation when I do everything else in some other programming language. Domain specific languages and such, I know I should be into it, but I’m just not.

RDF: Ok, so I know next to nothing about RDF. At least I know nothing besides the basic syntax. I feel like there’s a big aha moment waiting for me in RDF, but it just doesn’t seem interesting enough to invest in getting there.

I really feel bad about not getting RDF, because all the cool kids seem to be into it.

XQuery: The idea here is to have yet another XML based programming language? And this language is better than Python, Perl, or Ruby because?

I don’t feel bad about about not knowing much about XQuery. Seems like a sideways idea.

XLinq: This made a big splash but seems to have quieted down. I tried to get excited about it, but again I just didn’t get it. Take a look at Uche’s XLINQ examples in Amara. Amara looks a lot more interesting to me than XLinq.

2 Comments so far

  1. Daniel Lemire on December 26th, 2005

    Why XSLT? XSLT processors should be fast and optimized for this very task. The language should be complete and optimized for this task. But these reasons are secondary, the main reason to use XSLT is that it is the standard way to do so. Instead of having to learn how to transform XML using various APIs, I can just learn XSLT and XSLT should be supported whereever I go. Note that wherever Firefox lives, there is good XSLT 1.0 processor!

    RDF: again, this is the standard way to express knowledge on the web. It clearly hasn’t take up though, except for things like Dublin Core or Creative Commons. But Dublin Core and Creative Commons don’t need RDF. And RDF doesn’t need XML. And maybe we don’t need RDF nor XML. But people use these things. But I don’t know much about software supported RDF.

    I don’t get XQuery myself. The main argument for XQuery seems to be that since XSLT is so hard, and the task for extracting data from XML is so common, we are going to use an SQL-like language. Seems to be this will soon be a solution in search of a problem. We will see. Until a solution is widespread enough, you should be careful.

    XLinq: I also don’t see what is to be excited about. Worse: these things are not “standard” ways. They won’t be there wherever you go.

  2. Daniel Lemire on December 26th, 2005

    OH! And here’s a blog post answering your post:

    http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2005/12/26/standard-deviations-i-don%e2%80%99t-get-it-xslt-rdf-xquery-xlinq/

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