Re: Javascript and GRDDL (and economics-of-deployment use cases) from Dan Connolly on 2007-03-02 (public-grddl-wg@w3.org from March 2007)

From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:08:22 -0600
To: Chimezie Ogbuji <ogbujic@bio.ri.ccf.org>
Cc: public-grddl-wg <public-grddl-wg@w3.org>
Message-Id: <1172855302.26341.268.camel@dirk>

On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 10:41 -0500, Chimezie Ogbuji wrote:
> I wanted to bring this to the attention of the WG (spotted by Danny). It
> would be a shame if this passed by the radar (at the very least it is very relevant commentary):
>
> http://simile.mit.edu/mail/ReadMsg?listName=General&msgId=15275

I wonder where Stefano gets the impression that the GRDDL
WG is working "without taking into consideration the
practical implications or today's technological limitations
and boundaries (or, worse, the socio-economical aspects associated
to it)"

I specifically wrote about it last December:

GRDDL + microformats economics-of-deployment use case
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-grddl-wg/2006Dec/0061

I added a link to that thread from
http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Noodles_Go_Semantic_Web

I can see 3 ways for the scenario to play out; 2 that work with
Web Architecture and one that works against it:

(1) Alice could learn RDFa and use it for her noodle list.
Maybe that's easy, maybe that's hard, depending on
-- the structure of her noodle list
--- e.g. whether it uses microparsing or exposes everything
at the XML level
-- the knowledge and preferences of her peers, i.e. whether
they want to make documents similar to hers, write cool
tools to animate the data, etc.

(1a) Alice includes a profile or transformation link as well.
All the GRDDL-aware agents (e.g. XMLArmyknife, tabulator, ...)
get her data, as well as RDFa-native tools (TopQuadrant, ...)

(1b) Alice doesn't bother with a GRDDL pointer, but just
uses RDFa markup without establishing a follow-your-nose
path from her documents to the RDFa specs. There is a hidden
cost in this scenario, which is the cost of the standaridzation
community completing that follow-your-nose path by editing
the IANA text/html registry entry and/or the XHTML namespace
document. And there's a risk that this won't happen, in which
case her document does not end up webarch-happy after all;
see case (3) below.

(2) Bob, the SemWeb advocate, could write an XSLT transformation
for Alice's noodle list, and Alice could just add a link to it.
This is clearly less work for Alice, but more for Bob.
Only GRDDL-aware agents get the data. Copy-and-paste is tricker.

(3) Alice goes on a world-tour to drum up support in a
noodle list microformat, and soon so many people are using
her noodle list creator and noodleListMaker.php that,
well, webarch-be-damned, the data is so interesting that
services start scraping it.

The reason that Web Architecture is against (3) is that,
without consent of the governed, it reduces the choice
of other HTML authors. They have to know not to use the
markup patterns in the noodle list microformat, lest services
start doing stuff with their documents that they don't agree with.