Re: Microdata design philosophies

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Martin McEvoy <martin@weborganics.co.uk> wrote:
> No actually it isn't RDFa exist because people want to embed "specifically"
> RDF in X/HTML

That's not a use-case.  Nobody runs around thinking, "You know what
this page needs?  Some RDF!".  They want to embed some *data* so that
some application can interface with the page, and one tool they can
use to do this is RDF.  Another is Microdata.  Both solve the same
use-cases.  (If you disagree, *PLEASE* give an example of some data
that you can embed with RDFa that you can't with Microdata!  Ian keeps
asking for examples of such, but no one's ever given one!)

> Microformats age just good design patterns, the reasons for using them are
> not the same as RDFa

Hmm?  I disagree.  Microformats are a way of labelling the
human-readable data on a page so that machines can read it too.

Similarly, RDFa focuses mostly on labelling data that already exists
on the page in such a way that machines can read it.  Microdata does
the same.  (Both RDFa and Microdata also allow you to embed data in
the page that isn't visible to humans, which Microformats do not.)

> You have actually tried mixing the three? I had a terrible experience It
> amounted to nothing but "tag soup"...

Could you give an example?  I literally cannot imagine a case where
RDFa mixes well with Microformats but Microdata does not.  It doesn't
make any sense to me, but I may just be missing something obvious.

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 15 October 2009 22:07:29 UTC