The second coming of the Web

I've been watching Danny Ayers' attempts to have Semantic Web people consider outputting RSS and OPML data or using OPML tools to visualize Semantic Web data. I respect and applaud his efforts, but I wasn't surprised by the universally negative reactions. I know that users of RDF based formats have tremendous disdain for RSS and OPML as being poorly defined, which they admittedly are. What I was shocked by was the tone and terms used in the responses. There is an almost religious sense of RSS and OPML as evil, and a possible source of spiritual contamination. Now Semantic Web people are extremely intelligent, as they'll be quick to admit, so what could have happened to them to cause such an adverse reaction to what is simply a set of formats for text files? It is easy to point to the creator of RSS and OPML as the root of this negative feeling, he certainly is mentioned often in the response to Danny's pleas. But that is just scapegoating. I think the visceral emotion exhibited, almost a form of terror, at the idea of having to co-exist with RSS and OPML, has a deeper cause that fits into the religious fervor with which it is voiced.

When Tim Berners-Lee first gave mankind the Web, he made a tragic mistake. He granted us free will to use less than perfect HTML. His tools, and the tools of those to follow him, allowed users to develop sinful habits based on ignorance and sloth. The result was a Web of corrupt data, in which misformed tags abounded. This great fall from grace by the users of the Web prevented it from ever attaining the state of perfection desired by all computer scientists, a completely machine readable database. So the disciples of Berners-Lee, with his blessing, developed XML as a way of wiping the Web clean of the sinful and broken HTML, and replacing it with perfectly specified and implemented data. Now, just as the second coming of the Web is in sight in the form of the Sematic Web (well, its been in sight for years, but we'll put that aside), here comes a poorly specified corruption of XML, what Danny jokingly calls "quasi-XML", that threatens to again lead mankind astray. Is it any wonder that Semantic Web devotees are reacting as if RSS and OPML are the work of Satan?

Do you find all of this over the top? Good. That is the point of satire. I find the reactions of Semantic Web people over the top as well. It's just data. Converting from one format to another is so trivial that even I can write the code to do it. Surely anyone who can code for RDF could import or export RSS and OPML. Why should anyone do it? As Danny keeps pointing out, there are millions of RSS users. In time many of them are likely to use OPML as a container for RSS. There is no reason why OPML can't be viewed as a bridge between these two sides of the Web. But then if I was in league with the devil, I would say something like that, wouldn't I? After all, my namesake was led astray by the devil once before.