/Cinny
/Cinny
/Cinny
RDF was invented by Big WWW to make harder to understand, more complex formats
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper that’s like broadly the disconnect i find with this entire sphere
sure it is marked up in a manner that a machine can parse. but it can’t interpret it without a human telling it what to do. now you moved the problem one step back for no reason
which is also my issue with HATEOAS (REST maturity level 4). hypertext is Useful for sentient creatures. not for machines. for machines you have to write code to hook up a REST API anyways. at which point you can specify “Oh you can access the second page of results by requesting the same API endpoint but with an &after= property set to the last element in the results” instead of Having A Link in the response for no particularly good reason
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper i don’t think there is much difference for a program between a “displayName” property and a “https://schema.org/Person#name” property. you still have to hook it up into your application logic manually unless you are showing a property dump or sth
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper they are IRIs though and not URLs
unlike URLs they do not locate resources, just identify them
unlike URIs they support unicode characters
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper like you still have a schema that you still need to explicitly write code for. which is no better than having it in a format that is extensible but not massively overcomplicated for no good reason
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper even if it was possible to fetch the schema in run time in some way, your application, unless it’s hooked up into an LLM i suppose, cannot make use of the data unless you very explicitly write code for handling it
which is also why i think the semantic web is mainly just inventing a problem to solve
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper the schema IRIs are also not usually fetchable URLs
you might be able to fetch them and they might lead somewhere but they also often don’t contain schema definitions in a readable format
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper I don’t think for practical applications that it’s possible to not hard code a schema
/Cinny
@kopper @ShadowJonathan although actually remove the whole @type thing when the schema says it’s a specific type
{
"@type": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Create",
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#actor": {
"@id": "acct:sally@example.org",
"@type": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Person",
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#name": "Sally"
},
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#object": {
"@type": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Note",
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#content": "This is a simple note"
},
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#published": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
}
/Cinny
@kopper @ShadowJonathan yeah
basically instead of
{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"@type": "Create",
"actor": {
"@type": "Person",
"@id": "acct:sally@example.org",
"name": "Sally"
},
"object": {
"@type": "Note",
"content": "This is a simple note"
},
"published": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
}
it’s
{
"@type": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Create",
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#actor": {
"@id": "acct:sally@example.org",
"@type": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Person",
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#name": "Sally"
},
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#object": {
"@type": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Note",
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#content": "This is a simple note"
},
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#published": {
"@type": "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime",
"@value": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
}
}
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper (so like basically json-ld should exclusively be the compacted form and the @context be abolished. mastodon federation protocol™ messages are not that)
/Cinny
@ShadowJonathan @kopper in an ideal world json-ld would have leaned into this a lot more and went like
“Oh what if we named the object keys after the IRI of their definition” which they Did Not Do. instead you get a gigantic mess