Re: overstock.com adds GoodRelations in RDFa to 900,000 item pages

Hi Karl:

> Something which is really not cool in all these instance of  
> GoodRelations is that they are not really taking the benefits of html 
> +RDFa. They put an extra bag of empty divs and spans. That's kind of  
> sad.
>
> They could directly use the HTML content model. It is just a  
> templating thing.

I don't think it is sad; because using invisible div / span elements  
nicely decouple the organization of the visual content from the  
embedded data.

In fact, for non-trivial data structures, writing RDFa that reuses the  
same characters for the rendering and for the data gets ugly and  
complicated (using many "about" and "resource" attributes to link back  
and forth).

The data redudancy / maintenance argument raised frequently is also no  
real issue when we are talking of dynamically generated Web pages,  
because two occurrences of the same placeholder will always get the  
same correct content when processed by the template engine.

The full argument for using RDFa in what we call "snippet style" is  
given here:

Hepp, Martin; García, Roberto; Radinger, Andreas: RDF2RDFa: Turning  
RDF into Snippets for Copy-and-Paste, in: Poster and Demo Proceedings  
of the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009),  
Washington, DC, USA, October 25-29, 2009.

PDF: http://www.heppnetz.de/files/RDF2RDFa.pdf

As for the "real benefits" of RDFa: I think the reuse of content  
argument is overrated. For me, the key advantage is that I can  
transport RDF data as payload in any HTML markup, which means that  
even malconfigured, badly maintained servers run by lay people can  
serve such rich meta-data. Content negotitiation, linked data  
publishing recipes etc are nice, but a vast majority of site owners is  
running their site with minimal understanding and Web engineering  
competence.


Martin


On 06.10.2010, at 22:16, Karl Dubost wrote:

>
> Le 6 oct. 2010 à 08:39, Martin Hepp a écrit :
>> Example:
>> http://www.overstock.com/Electronics/Bell-and-Howell-DV550UW-12MP-Digital-Video-Camera-with-Underwater-Housing/4450313/product.html
>
>
> Something which is really not cool in all these instance of  
> GoodRelations is that they are not really taking the benefits of html 
> +RDFa. They put an extra bag of empty divs and spans. That's kind of  
> sad.
>
> They could directly use the HTML content model. It is just a  
> templating thing.
>
> Would there be a possibility to help them create a different markup?
>
>
>
> -- 
> Karl Dubost
> Montréal, QC, Canada
> http://www.la-grange.net/karl/
>

Received on Wednesday, 6 October 2010 21:09:51 UTC