Creating Applications with Mozilla
by David Boswell, Brian King, Ian Oeschger, Pete Collins, Eric Murphy
Chapter 10. RDF, RDF Tools, and the Content Model
Chapter 9 introduced the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as the basis for building display data in the interface, where XUL templates take RDF-based data and transform it into regular widgets. But RDF is used in many other more subtle ways in Mozilla. In fact, it is the technology Mozilla uses for much of its own internal data handling and manipulation.
RDF is, as its name suggests, a framework for integrating many types of data that go into the browser, including bookmarks, mail messages, user profiles, IRC channels, new Mozilla applications, and your collection of sidebar tabs. All these items are sets of data that RDF represents and incorporates into the browser consistently. RDF is used prolifically in Mozilla, which is why this chapter is so dense.
This chapter introduces RDF, provides some detail about how Mozilla uses RDF for its own purposes, and describes the RDF tools that are available on the Mozilla platform. The chapter includes information on special JavaScript libraries that make RDF processing much easier, and on the use of RDF in manifests to represent JAR file contents and cross-platform installation archives to Mozilla.
Once you understand the concepts in this chapter, you can make better use of data and metadata in your own application development.
10.1. RDF Basics
RDF has two parts: the RDF Data Model and the RDF Syntax (or Grammar). The RDF Data Model is a graph with nodes and arcs, much like other data ...
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