My previous post was not that clear about the relations between XPDL and DOAML's XMLNS. First of all, when I say "XMLNS" here, I mean "the XHTML version of the XMLNS", or, more precisely "the XHTML document you get if you point your browser to the namespace URI and request a MIME-type different from application/rdf+xml".

Secondly, this document must present briefly the main facts about the ontology, its goals, and the ways to get in touch with the community. This, for sure, must be done using existing RDF documents. It would be a perfect example of what can be acomplished through the definition and use of metadata: automatic page generation and (somewhat) automatic page updates. We already have all the pieces to build this puzzle: a little bit of DOAP data, some OWL data from the ontology, and some DCMI metadata for the XHTML document in itself.

We just need to pick the right informations from the right document. But here begin the bad news. We don't have any way of querying an RDF document using the advantages of its XML serialization. We can use SPARQL to query RDF documents, or XQuery to query an XML document, or, last but not least, XSL to transform an XML document. I would like to see a language / document type / whatever that would mix up XSL advantages (producing XML documents without breaking the "all-XML" chain, eg), but use SPARQL (or any other RDF query language, maybe more XPath-like, but playing with triples) instead of XPath...

But we don't have it now. Then we must use XSL, in order to transform XML documents into other XML documents. This truely sucks, because XSL cannot handle well the unpredictable syntax of RDF, and cannot reason either on its meaning. But we admit that we have syntaxically consistant RDF documents (we do it ourselves!), and go on with XSL.

We have now a little pack of XHTML documents, invalid against the DTD for sure (no <head />, no <body />...), but that we will unite together into a unique, valid XHTML document, using XInclude. And here comes my previous post. In a few words, it says that make breaks the "all-XML" chain and that Ant Java sucks, whereas XPDL rocks the Holy Trout.