Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

Bill,

a while ago I wrote a blog on how I do it on the Semantic Web Activity
home page:

http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/05/using_rdfa_to_add_information.html

the blog is from the early days of RDFa, some of the specific issues may
be different today (see below), but the overall line, I believe, works
well. It may be helpful...

What is different or should be different:

- The .htaccess example refers to the RDFa distiller at W3C (which,
well, I wrote, so of course I had to eat my own dogfood:-). With the
increasing popularity of RDFa our system guys have already complained
about sudden server request surges on that service. Ie, although it is
fine to use the service as it is in the .htaccess example (with full
URI-s, though) if you (or anybody else) uses it with a large number of
calls, it is better to install the service locally an run it from there
(it is a bunch of python files, it should not be difficult to install it).

(Of course, an alternative is to run the script only once, when updating
the html file. But, if not done manually, this needs some server magic...)

- I use http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ as an example, though _that_ one has
changed a little bit and is more complicated today (Essentially, the
HTML file has become too large and I had to cut into several files, so I
have to merge the RDF graphs. This is something different...)

Cheers

Ivan


Bill Roberts wrote:
> Thanks everyone who replied.
> 
> It seems that there's a lot of support for the RDFa route in that
> (perhaps not statistically significant) sample of opinion.  But to
> summarise my understanding of your various bits of advice:  since there
> aren't currently so many applications out there consuming RDF, a good
> RDF publisher should provide as many options as possible.
> 
> Therefore rather than deciding for either RDFa or a content-negotiated
> approach, why not do both (and provide a dump file too)
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Bill
> 
> 
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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