Re: Data blocks, not marked up content

Hi Tom, all:

A bit of background why we think that invisible markup is an important option for

1. non-trivial data structures, in particular if they
2. do not correspond to the organization of the visible content is here:

Hepp, Martin; García, Roberto; Radinger, Andreas: RDF2RDFa: Turning RDF into Snippets for Copy-and-Paste, Technical Report TR-2009-01, 2009.

A PDF is here: http://www.heppnetz.de/files/RDF2RDFa-TR.pdf

This is even more important if you face messy, complicated HTML markup as in article detail pages, because the heuristics for dealing with RDFa in lax HTML are more reliable if the RDFa snippet itself is a self-contained block - e.g. forgotten closing elements cannot break the structure of the data.

By the way, despite that Google discourages invisible markup officially, they ingest and display it, as long as it comes from an otherwise trustworthy page / domain name space. I have lots of examples for this ;)

Best

Martin

> And to be clear: I did not advocate this. I am just saying that this is certainly an approach.
Sure thing. I think it came from the fact that some CMS-es don't grant
users enough edit rights, so adding invisible blocks was seen as an
ugly, but valid hack to get the structured data out there. I _think_
Martin Hepp coined the idea, but I am entirely unsure.

Tom

-- 
Thomas Steiner, Research Scientist, Google Inc.

http://blog.tomayac.com, http://twitter.com/tomayac

Received on Monday, 10 October 2011 06:40:19 UTC