RE: Role of RDFa in 2016

Hi All, 

As for using RDFa with HTML, yes, we are using it. We also have a function to export JSON-LD and we publish JSON-LD with our Word Press plugin (all in beta). But the image annotations are primarily in RDFa and we are able to publish the HTML + RDFa files from our system in other places around the web...this is quite convenient for being able to publish documents that are both human and machine readable. 

It works seamlessly with being able to share links to our web pages in places like Facebook and Twitter and those services can then use the HTML elements to render their posts and thumbnails, but the source of the page additionally includes the RDFa, should any machine want to use it. 

You can sign in and experiment with the system at: http://www.imagesnippets.com 
our new front page is coming *very* soon now. 

Margaret Warren


-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Ford [mailto:kefo@3windmills.com] 
Sent: Monday, October 03, 2016 9:31 PM
To: Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>
Subject: Role of RDFa in 2016

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

Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2016 18:04:14 UTC