Re: XML and GNOME community

[Daniel Veillard w3 org]

Quoting Elliot Lee (sopwith@redhat.com):
> > Could you recommend a direction for GNOME to start in for using XML as the
> > format for saving & loading documents?
> 
> Oops, I just realized this may be a bad question to ask (i.e. I'm clueless
> here! :). Is XML the format to use, or is RDF - what's the relation
> between the two, what's the big picture?

  Well, there was already a couple of good answers to this mail, I globally
agree with them. Let say that information about mail messages could be 
stored into an XML encoding. 
  Basically RDF is a specialized DTD whose purpose is to describe metadata,
i.e. informations about another object, but RDF is tied to the network in
the sense that you reference your object with URLs. Using RDF to describe
the informations about mails and mailboxes in the gnome mail application
would make sense if these object can be referenced by an URL. For example
if their content is made available via Corba, then using RDF and URLs of
the form iiop://my.machine.name/oid would make sense. Otherwise, RDF is
not really adequate.
  
  Daniel

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