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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

XML doesn't support hyperlinks either. In fact, that was my point. JSON or XML are not formats, just transport mechanisms. You need a format (which may be encoded in JSON or not) that defines those semantics.

Personally, I drank the RDF kool-aid some time ago, and I think the best solution for many services is either RDFa augmented HTML, or Turtle for a more "pure" data response.

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XML doesn't support hyperlinks, but I didn't say I use XML. I use xhtml, which is a specific content type that is both widely understood by existing programs and also has explicit and standardized support for hyperlinks.

I liked RDF for a while too. I even came close to designing and building an RDF database for my employer at the time. Too bad it didn't catch on.

The base definition of XML doesn't specify hyperlinks. But XLink does, and because XML has namespaces, it can be integrated into any other namespace-aware XML application without risk of collisions: http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/

> The base definition of XML doesn't specify hyperlinks.

No definition of XML does.

> But XLink does

By having the client understand xlink exists and accessing xlink attributes you get links. This is no different than specifying that there are URL values corresponding to specific keys in your JSON-derived media type.

An XLink-containing document is a media type derived from XML in the exact same manner.

> and because XML has namespaces, it can be integrated into any other namespace-aware XML application without risk of collisions: http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/

Not really relevant to the discussion, is it?

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