Re: <acronym title="?">RDFa</acronym>

Hi Simone,

'a' for annotation is good -- I like that. :)

But as Ben said, it always stood for 'attributes'.

As Steven pointed out though, the language's name was initially chosen
so that it would be clear that it was just another way to write RDF.

The original 'RDF language' was of course RDF/XML, and then we got
others, like RDF/N3. So we thought that our language could be called
RDF/XHTML, which was later change to RDF/A.

However, you'll find that if you search for "rdf/a" in Google, you get
pages that contain things like this:

  "Topic maps and RDF: A first cut, first published in June 2000."
  "Using Protégé-2000 to Edit RDF - a paper"

As you can see, these results are nothing to do with RDFa, and would
simply frustrate new users. So in the end we dropped the "/" to make
the name 'search-engine compliant'.

Regards,

Mark

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 6:22 PM, Simone Onofri <simone.onofri@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Oh well, this is really interesting! I've always searched for an
> explanation of RDFa, taking RDF as Resource Description Framework, the
> "a", starting from the RDF/A name I've always referred to "annotation"
> a frequent word on introduction like Semantic Annotation and
> something.
>
> So I'm are more curious: there are some reason you choose the "a"
> respec other letters?
>
> However, taking this occasion, can be a nice idea choosing if RDFa is
> an acronym or not, and if yes to choose the meaning of "a"?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Simone
>
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Steven Pemberton
> <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl> wrote:
>> And there was me claiming to others that it was not an acronym, just a name.
>> Oh well.
>>
>> For the record, for anyone reading this who cares:
>>
>> There are different serialisations of RDF, and RDF/XML is the name of one of
>> them. Consequently we initially called our serialisation RDF/XHTML
>> (http://webbackplane.com/node/57), but then when we extended it to be usable
>> on more than XHTML we renamed it RDF/A
>> (http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/05-steven-www2005/), and then we changed it to
>> RDFa to make it 'Google-search-friendly'.
>> http://www.w3.org/2006/04/18-htmltf-minutes#item01
>>
>> Since RDF/A is not strictly an acronym, I had never considered RDFa as an
>> acronym either.
>>
>> Steven
>>
>> On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:22:30 +0200, Ben Adida <ben@adida.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Simone Onofri wrote:
>>>>
>>>> RDF of RDFa stands for Resource Description Framework... this is not a
>>>> question... clear, but the "a"?
>>>
>>> RDF in _a_ttributes
>>>
>>> :)
>>> -Ben
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Simone Onofri
> http://www.siatec.net/
>
>



-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

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Received on Thursday, 18 September 2008 17:46:55 UTC