Re: [HTML] Re: additional GRDDL editor

* Mark Birbeck wrote:
>However, everyone knows that pretty much no other community outside of the
>RDF one has taken up RDF/XML. HTML authors certainly haven't, so the real
>problem to solve is how the RDF-world can get access to the metadata that
>the HTML authors provide, when the HTML authors are never going to provide
>it in a form that can be processed by the RDF-world (i.e., RDF/XML).

Indeed, the HTML authoring community did not adopt RDF/XML syntax for
their web sites. The reasons for that are quite obvious, XHTML does not
enjoy widespread adoption so authors can only use things that are HTML-
compatible and RDF/XML syntax clearly isn't except if you put the meta
data into comments which is technically unsound. There is also no W3C
specification that explains how to do that anyway. So first and fore-
most the community does not adopt RDF/XML syntax because it can't.

Your conclusion that HTML authoring community won't ever adopt RDF/XML
is interesting though, I assume there are technical reasons why it would
be unreasonable to expect them to use RDF/XML syntax in XHTML 2.0, maybe
you can elaborate on these issues and how RDF/A solves these problems?
The draft notes validation and unwieldy syntax and I've pointed out why
I think RDF/A addresses neither of these nor many other problems.

>However, we felt that it might be possible to come up with a different
>approach that leverages the HTML author's understanding of <meta> and
><link>;

This is an interesting remark; I thought it is pretty clear from the 
public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf archives that even people familiar with both
RDF and HTML have trouble to understand when to use RDF/A's <link> or
<meta> element, how to nest them or how to combine them with the many
attributes to achieve the desired effect.

<link> links to resources related to the document and <meta> is for
document meta data and fake HTTP headers. Much of this is no longer
true with RDF/A (and not widely known anyway) and beyond that I fail
to see how RDF/A leverages much here.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Thursday, 19 May 2005 23:26:18 UTC