RDFa use cases (was: Underline element.)

On 1/6/08, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au> wrote:
>  Why would an author have any desire to add such
> markup using a custom vocabulary that few tools, if any, will understand
> and even fewer users would have any use for?

Well, it is just an example, but your question is important. There
will be a lot of use cases for information exchange that only is
relevant to the parties involved. The web is a big decentralised place
and it would be impossible to try to list all possible use cases for
information exchange on the HTML WG mailing list. For a couple of
scenarios see [1].

In fact, this is one of the fundamental differences between RDFa and
the Microformats(.org) approach. Microformats.org has a centralised
approach where vocabularies only seem to be legal if they are relevant
to a lot of people and already exist on the web.

If I want to be able to publish my shipbuilding information in a
machine readable way so that Ben Boyle can read it with his tool I can
not see why we should have to involve a third party to create our
vocabulary and markup method?

There are already a number of tools and frameworks that can produce
and parse RDFa. The number of vocabularies that can be used in RDFa is
also significantly larger than the number of vocabularies at
microformats.org if I understand their listing correctly.

Regards,

Peter

[1]: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/scenarios/

Received on Sunday, 6 January 2008 00:40:34 UTC