How to apply web metadata, especially with XML formats has seen all kinds of tradeoff issues and arguments. From RDF to RSS to SOAP to WSDL, the common theme is an endless debate about complexity.
In this entry I wanted to talk about a bit about a complexity/simplicity tradeoff centering around extensibility and flexibility. Everyone loves extensibility, almost as much as simplicity in fact, and you will not hear many bad words said about the idea. Specifically I wanted to get specific and narrow it down to one issue - repository metadata in a format called DOAP.
DOAP is a format based on RDF for describing projects, by Edd Dumbill. It stands for Description Of A Project. It caused something of a shock when it was published, for two reasons. First it amply demonstrated that we had hardly any useful or interesting metadata about software projects. Which is terribly bad when you think about how much of the stuff we put out every year. Second, and this was far more shocking, it was a highly readable RDF/XML format. Shocking because, up to then, everyone knew, just knew, that RDF/XML was insanely complex and comprehensible markup simply could not be produced with it - there are approximately 5 wildly popular RSS formats based on that assumption and who knows how many other domain specific formats exist as a result.
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