to-blog.txt

Confession: I'm a slow learner. A pretty good learner I reckon, because I do persist at things, but slow all the same. Because of this I'm quite conservative when it comes to new technology, I don't like wasting time learning stuff that isn't going to be really useful. It might seem strange given this that I was an enthusiast for RDF from the early days. But to put that into context: I encountered it not long after I first encountered XML. I had a fair bit of programming experience, a little with HTML and the Web, a bit more with databases. At the time HTML made sense to me as formatting instructions. But XML seemed like the Emperor's New Clothes. Wrapping text in angle brackets and calling it data? It didn't make sense. But RDF gave this stuff a data model that paralleled those I saw in code and databases.