[metadata] What do publishers need to know?

A major source of confusion for the newcomer is the multiplicity of standards and concepts involved in adding metadata to HTML. It's easy to be disoriented by RDF, RDFa and RDFa Lite. I always confuse microformats and microdata. Is a friend of a friend a turtle or an owl? And is it really namespaces all the way down?

More concretely, Microformats and RDFa Lite appear to be nearly identical in functionality. Reading about the politics surrounding these specs does not fill me with confidence[1]. If  WHATWG, W3C and IDPF can't sort this out, what are we supposed to do?

I think this interest group could do an immense amount of good if it could educate the publishing community about the principles and practices of the semantic web. What do we need to know?

Dave

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0180.html





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