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Comment by rubenverborgh | Hacker News Reader

You'll be surprised to hear that developers like Linked Data. People starting with Linked Data development today are not burdened by the Semantic Web legacy and mistakes of the past. We've been working with front-end devs who have never seen RDF, and never will. They enjoy how Linked Data is able to cross borders and leads to more data than a centralized database could ever give you.

The confusion in your comment is that one would need RDF to do Linked Data. I've written about that misconception here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linke...

Don't get me wrong, the Semantic Web community has made mistakes and has not been developer-friendly. But we're not still stuck in the 90s. For instance, XML hasn't been a part of any of this for many years.

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By RDF did you mean RDF/XML specifically? JSON-LD is still RDF, it's just serialized differently, which is fine, I like RDF, but OP may have more specific concerns than the syntax.

Well, it also contains usable ordered lists. Which is not a small addition to rdf (it defines interop with rdf’s version of ordered lists, but the one in json-ld is array based with random access patterns and a .length while the pure rdf version is purely linked list based without any guarantees about having only one link)

The specific concern is that it's a 100th attempt at creating metadata for everything in the world. You can't create a non-ambiguous comprehensive catalog of the world.

This concern can't get less specific.

No, I mean RDF in general. As you can read in the article I linked to above, programming with Linked Data does not necessarily require RDF.

The very first paragraph on linkeddata.org says it is for "exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF."

It does. But linkeddata.org is not an authoritative source, and even though that statement is partially correct, that doesn't mean that JavaScript developers will need to be exposed to RDF. Just like JavaScript developers aren't exposed to assembly, even though V8 generates it.

It's a shame that linkeddata.org is the top Google result for "linked data" then.

I've been thinking someone with the expertise and influence should write "RDF: The Good Parts"

AKA instead of "Eval is Evil" we might instead say "XML is Evil"

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