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by Bill de hÓra.
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About LML, Danny Ayers asks why use it when there are formats such as XHTML and OXO. So please tell me again why should I use LML rather than either/both of these..? Fair question. I had a similar conversation with a few guys from work about this. We all agreed that a markup for lists was, well, absurd. Put it this way, if I published LML on April 1st, a lot of people would think it was a joke. Which to some degree it is. But. We've seen those kinds of arguments play out with formats like RSS and FOAF. Which format, or the absurdity of actually bothering to define a markup, don't matter so much as the fact that we are inundated with lists. The thing about lists is that they have a lot of untapped value. I believe a lot of information gets left behind when all you have to work with are <ol>, <ul> and <li>. In terms of moving up the semantic and social software food chain, lists + metadata are a natural next step. Arguably an Amazon wishlist or a list of people on LinkedIn have more value if they're decoupled from the sites themselves. Passing them around and sharing them might be cool. Much more important than using LML itself is getting people to turn their attention to mining this seam of data. Really, it plays to Tim O'Reilly's take that the future of lock-in is about data, not APIs. Danny mentions RDF. I have a RDF/XML variant (dc:subject, foaf) that might get done next weekend - I'll definitely being publishing it. As to why I shipped a vanilla XML format first, let me say this. In many respects RDF is an excellent choice for working with this kind of data as it has comes with a linking model, exactly what you want for merging data sets; the sticking point is that operating over RDF is still a big ask for a lot of people. At some point you have to stop writing things down and do something with the data. Doing with RDF or the other Semantic Web formats still requires a bigger commitment that most are willing to undertake. To give you an idea of how low hanging list fruit is, the LML 'spec' (if you can call it that) took about 4 hours to write. I figure the RDF version will take about twice that. re comments: I'm currently going 12 rounds with an MT upgrade and I think they're fixed now... anyway trackback is king ;)...
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