[whatwg] RDFa

[Dan Brickley]

Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
> It seems to me identification and description of various entities is best
> achieved with LDAP which is hierarchical by design.  Why wasn't LDAP adopted
> for the purpose, given that it is older, widely used and well understood?

Work began on LDAP (a simplification from X.500) in 1993; and on Dublin 
Core (in some ways a simplification of longstanding library cataloguing 
methds for the Web) in 1994. We might equally ask why it didn't use SGML 
(it did) or XML (it did that too, after it was invented). There was work 
on exploring the use of LDAP and X.500 to address Dublin Core's needs, 
eg. see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hamilton-dcxl-02 although it 
never really caught the world on fire. Why, is probably related to the 
larger question of why the Web evolved as a technology stack on top of 
IETF/internet specs rather than on top of X.500 or other work from that 
world...

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/