Raw

<i>It seems almost self-evident that when major changes to existing specifications and/or entirely new Web specifications are proposed, the onus should be on the proposers to clearly demonstrate they won't break the Web</i>...



Well, fine; but isn't this a bit of FUD? There's no reason to think anything about OWL could "break the Web"... That claim rests upon several questionable assumptions: first, that something that "broke" the Semantic Web (since that's what OWL is) would break "the Web"; second, that if OWL in the future "hurt the triples", that would "break the Semantic Web".



Both of those are by no means obvious or necessarily true. In fact, I think the second one is just false. It rests (entirely?) upon the "layer cake", and that's really just marketing.



Here's a thought experiment: if RDF couldn't be serialized as XML, would that "break the Web"? If yes, why yes? If not, why would OWL not being *in every maximal sense* compatible with RDF "break the Web"?



Finally, I've been around long enough to remember a very long list of things that were going to "break the Web", none of which have come even close (and *not* for the ordinary reasons, IMO), so it's obviously rather harder than people think.



That comment just strikes me as really FUDish, Danny, and not in keeping with the rest of yr piece, which is pretty good.@en