21 Jun 2003 Jimbob   » (Journeyer)

GnomeChat
Welp, I've been suckered into rewriting the XML IRC network list to use (gasp) RDF. My current plan is to have a parser that will parse something like this:

<rdf:RDF (xmlns garbage)>
    <rdf:Description about="irc://GIMPNet/">
        <dc:Title>GIMPNet</dc:Title>
        <irc:icon
             rdf:resource="http://www.gimp.org/icons/the_gimp_corner.gif"
             irc:width="77" irc:height="57 />
        <dc:Description rdf:parseType="Literal">
            <p>A paragraph.</p>
            <p>Another paragraph</p>
        </dc:Description>
        <irc:website>http://www.xach.org/gimpnet.html</irc:website>
        <irc:encoding>UTF-8</irc:encoding>
<!-- servers go here --> </rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF>
What's the major advantages to ditching what I've got for RDF? First and foremost, RDF is already a standard. The "irc:<blah>" stuff is a custom namespace, yes, but custom namespaces are accounted for in the standard, and a real RDF parser would take them into account (even if the values are unread). Also, if I'm already using an RDF parser, it shouldn't be that difficult to handle things like FOAF & vCard, which would both be undeniably cool features (trade address-book cards in your IRC client? groovy!). Finally, RDF's use of URIs means that I can easily handle conversion between <irc://irc.gnome.org/> and <irc://GIMPNet/>, as mandated by the Mozilla IRC URIs spec. Of course, all this is dependent on the assumption that I have any clue about RDF... :-)

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