When does a document "contain" RDFa?

Hi all,

This question seems to come up often, and it came up in this week's telecon:

When does a document "contain" RDFa?

The short answer: HTML documents already contain semantic information.
RDFa is about naturally extending these existing mechanisms to be more
expressive and scalable. There's no need to flag documents as
"containing RDFa," however: they already do by virtue of being HTML
documents. Or, to put it differently, they already contain semantic
statements, which can easily be interpreted as RDF triples. Note that
this does *not* result in semantic statements that the author didn't
intend (though the author may not have been thinking of RDF specifically.)

We've talked about this many times, and Mark has delved into the details
of this issue before. I thought I would point out a handful of relevant
emails to bring everyone up to speed (in reverse chronological order):


RDFa leverages existing semantics of HTML (19 June 2006)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2006Jun/0110.html

Leveraging Existing CLASS attribute (3 June 2006):
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2006Jun/0009.html

First Mention of "Localized Triples" (23 October 2005):
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2005Oct/0050.html


Mark, if I've missed some, please send them along!

-Ben

Received on Friday, 22 September 2006 19:56:13 UTC