Re: RDFa and GRDDL and Drupal

On May 29, 2006, at 8:48 PM, Dan Connolly wrote:

> Yes, there are. Lots of them.
> Please look around before you jump to conclusions and spread
> misinformation.

Fair enough, Dan. I apologize for missing this.

I would like to ask that you be just as careful when you're talking  
about RDFa. Your last two emails are incomplete and thus incorrect.

Remember the RDFa requirements (a subset here, for clarity):
1) publisher independence in picking vocabularies
2) in-context metadata with copy-and-paste
3) expressing metadata about embedded objects and fragments of pages

GRDDL doesn't provide (2). Microformats don't provide (1) and (3).  
eRDF doesn't provide (2) and (3).

I hope that, next time you suggest GRDDL or MFs or eRDF, you point  
out these three important pieces of information. RDFa was created for  
a number of important reasons, reasons I've discussed with you in  
private and on this mailing list many times. Please remember these  
points in the future, even if you disagree with them. Without  
pointing them out, you're misleading folks by claiming that they  
"might as well" use other solutions.

Yes, it's clear you prefer everything but RDFa. But no, these  
solutions are not all the same. MFs might be enough in some cases.  
GRDDL might be enough in some cases. eRDF might be enough in some  
cases. These are all great contributions that have their place. But  
they are not replacements for RDFa, and there are a *lot* of  
legitimate uses of RDFa, in particular Creative Commons (50M pages  
and growing), semantic wikis, etc....

[...]

> rel="tag" is certainly simpler than RDFa or eRDF or GRDDL or any
> of the other markup idioms in this space and it's pretty widely
> deployed. I don't look forward to trying to change author habits
> for that sort of thing.

And yet you too are trying to change authors' habits, by having them  
add a PROFILE attribute when that is clearly not the current  
practice. I think it's a great idea, but you can't have your cake and  
eat it, too. Either you accept what authors are doing exactly as is,  
or you try to change their habits. Clearly, what authors are  
currently doing is not enough, according to your own efforts.

I think you and I agree here: there is a problem with scalability if  
you don't ground your concepts in URIs *somehow*. So, when  
microformat users start adding a PROFILE attribute, then GRDDL will  
work, and so will hGRDDL for converting microformats into RDFa, and  
then all the RDFa tools can read microformats and preserve metadata  
context, and life will be great! The same can be done for eRDF, with  
a profile attribute. I want an inclusive approach to all of these  
things, and this inclusive approach *includes* RDFa for all of the  
important use cases that are not covered by other solutions.

I was under the impression you thought this was a cool idea [1].

Regardless, I would ask that you accept that, even if you don't see  
the point of RDFa, many people do.

-Ben

[1] http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/133

Received on Tuesday, 30 May 2006 01:37:26 UTC