Talk:Thunderbird:Thoughts on Removing RDF

Although I've read a lot in Mozilla about replacing RDF, I'm not really sure what motivates it. Why is it so important to replace RDF in Thunderbird?

RKentJames 2007-01-25

As I understand it, RDF, in addition to being largely unowned/unmaintained code, is simply the wrong solution for the problems trying to be solved in the places it is used. RDF's relational nature allows for aggregation of multiple sources of overlapping data, but Mozilla almost always needs only flat tables for storage. See this discussion for people who can explain it better than I can.

--jminta

Can I make a request that you're really careful when implementing these views. Generic controllers that can be attached to treeviews and other types of views are easier to extend. Something like was (at least attempted) with Places. The current msgDBView interfaces make it nearly impossible to use anything that isn't a tree without basically erasing the entire UI and writing your own.

2 responses here. First, the nsMsgDBViews are in fact not RDF-driven, and are beyond the scope of this page. Second, one reason those views which are RDF-driven are being redone is to increase extensibility. I'm keeping extensibility in mind as I do this. Feedback is welcome on those changes if a particular extension runs into difficulty.

--jminta