Re: Role of RDFa in 2016

On 10/3/16 10:31 PM, Kevin Ford wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Although I feel like I will be flamed for this question, I was
> interested in hearing some opinions about the role of RDFa vs JSON-LD
> (embedded in the HTML header, let's say) in HTML now that the latter
> has become more accepted, at least when it comes to one major search
> engine.  Has that weakened the use case for, or role of, RDFa?
>
> To ask a broad question: Who/What consumers make regular use of RDFa
> (because there is no alternate/easy serialization to obtain)?
>
> To ask a slightly more targeted question, if you publish a data
> service that responds to content-negotiation (and which can embed
> JSON-LD in the header and which can also provide rel="alternate" links
> in the header), is it reasonable to conclude that RDFa is overkill in
> such a scenario?
>
> I recognize the use case for RDFa is much deeper than search engines,
> but I also suspect that in most cases when a service publishes RDFa in
> the HTML, that same service likely has made a 'cleaner' alternate
> serialization available.
>
> --Kevin 

If you have the current generation of Web document search engines in
mind then <script/> is your best bet as most will be looking for JSON-LD
(Google and Schema.org influence). Beyond JSON-LD they would be looking
for Microdata (Google and Schema.org influence), and possibly RDFa
(Facebook OGP influence).

Ultimately, this is a "horses for courses" affair i.e., use the solution
that best serves your structured data publishing goals, cost-effectively.

[1] http://osds.openlinksw.com -- Structured Data Sniffer (a tool that
can help you better understand what's currently in use, by different
publishers).

-- 
Regards,

Kingsley Idehen       
Founder & CEO 
OpenLink Software   (Home Page: http://www.openlinksw.com)

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