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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

I like Turtle:

    <http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar>
    dc:title "RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised)" ;
    ex:editor [
      ex:fullname "Dave Beckett";
      ex:homePage <http://purl.org/net/dajobe/>
    ] .

It's only useful if you drank the RDF kool-aid (like I have), though.

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You have good taste, since I invented Turtle. To keep this on topic, I've been using JSON for data web APIs since that's what it's best at. It sucks at: markup and graphs of course.

We use JSON for graphs. What sucks about it? In what sense is XML better at representing graphs?

There's no way to point from one part of a JSON doc to another without inventing a terminology or convention for marking the start (anchor) and end of the arc (href). People use 'id' for one end but there's no way to say a json value is actually a reference (href) not just a string. XML has that built in (ID IDREF) and so does HTML, but I didn't say XML was better, I said JSON sucks at markup and graphs. JSON's handy for serializing trees of data with no loops.

What do you mean by "built in"? I don't see how or why an ID couldn't be used in the same manner; the implementation is just a little different because they store data differently.

XML is only a series of nodes and attributes. There isn't really anything else special about it and it's trivial to represent it in JSON so I'm not sure I follow your issue. Could you provide an example?

Holy %!#@, I never knew the inventor of Turtle posted on HN. That's awesome. Turtle does, indeed, rock. But I'm also a Semantic Web Koolaid drinker, so my viewpoints may be a bit out of line with the "mainstream."

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