Folks, let me give you some additional data points on this issue. Some years ago, IW3C2, which promotes the WWW conference, and of which I am a member, is very interested in furthering the use of Web standards, for all the reasons that have already been mentioned in this discussion, decided to ask authors to submit papers in (X)Html. After all, WWW is a *Web* conference! (This was before RDF and its associated tools were available.) The bottom line was that authors REFUSED do submit in this format, partly because of lack of tools, partly because they were just comfortable with the existing tools. There were so many that it would have simply ruined the conference if the organization simply refused these submissions. The objection was so strong that IW3C2 eventually had to change its mind, and keep it they way it was, and currently is. Clearly, for some specialized communities, certain alternative formats may be acceptable - ontologies, in the context of sepublica, make perfect sense as an acceptable submission format. But when dealing with a more general audience, I do not believe we have the power to FORCE people to adopt any single specialized format - as everything else, these things emerge from a community consensus over time, even if first spearheaded by a smaller core group. Before that happens, we need to have a very clear value proposition and, most of all, good tools for people to accept and change. Most people will not change their ways is not convinced that it's worth the additional effort - and having really good tools is a sine qua non requirement for this. On the other hand, efforts continue to at least provide metadata in RDF, which has been surprisingly harder to produce year after year without requiring hand coding and customization each time. But we will get there, I hope. Just my 2c... Cheers Daniel --- Daniel Schwabe Dept. de Informatica, PUC-Rio General Co-Chair, WWW 2103
Tel:+55-21-3527 1500 r. 4356 R. M. de S. Vicente, 225 Fax: +55-21-3527 1530 Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22453-900, Brasil http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~dschwabe
