RE: RDFa and GRDDL and Drupal

Peeping carefully above the parapet ...

Is there an opportunity for a discussion with the Drupal folks?

It seems to me that it is not for us to decide what they should use
here.  But I wonder if there is an opportunity to ensure they are aware
of the tradeoffs for the different approaches.

I'm excited about getting the metadata in there.  

Brian


-----Original Message-----
From: public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ben Adida
Sent: 30 May 2006 02:37
To: Dan Connolly
Cc: public-rdf-in-xhtml task force
Subject: Re: RDFa and GRDDL and Drupal



On May 29, 2006, at 8:48 PM, Dan Connolly wrote:

> Yes, there are. Lots of them.
> Please look around before you jump to conclusions and spread 
> misinformation.

Fair enough, Dan. I apologize for missing this.

I would like to ask that you be just as careful when you're talking
about RDFa. Your last two emails are incomplete and thus incorrect.

Remember the RDFa requirements (a subset here, for clarity):
1) publisher independence in picking vocabularies
2) in-context metadata with copy-and-paste
3) expressing metadata about embedded objects and fragments of pages

GRDDL doesn't provide (2). Microformats don't provide (1) and (3).  
eRDF doesn't provide (2) and (3).

I hope that, next time you suggest GRDDL or MFs or eRDF, you point out
these three important pieces of information. RDFa was created for a
number of important reasons, reasons I've discussed with you in private
and on this mailing list many times. Please remember these points in the
future, even if you disagree with them. Without pointing them out,
you're misleading folks by claiming that they "might as well" use other
solutions.

Yes, it's clear you prefer everything but RDFa. But no, these solutions
are not all the same. MFs might be enough in some cases.  
GRDDL might be enough in some cases. eRDF might be enough in some cases.
These are all great contributions that have their place. But they are
not replacements for RDFa, and there are a *lot* of legitimate uses of
RDFa, in particular Creative Commons (50M pages and growing), semantic
wikis, etc....

[...]

> rel="tag" is certainly simpler than RDFa or eRDF or GRDDL or any of 
> the other markup idioms in this space and it's pretty widely deployed.

> I don't look forward to trying to change author habits for that sort 
> of thing.

And yet you too are trying to change authors' habits, by having them add
a PROFILE attribute when that is clearly not the current practice. I
think it's a great idea, but you can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Either you accept what authors are doing exactly as is, or you try to
change their habits. Clearly, what authors are currently doing is not
enough, according to your own efforts.

I think you and I agree here: there is a problem with scalability if you
don't ground your concepts in URIs *somehow*. So, when microformat users
start adding a PROFILE attribute, then GRDDL will work, and so will
hGRDDL for converting microformats into RDFa, and then all the RDFa
tools can read microformats and preserve metadata context, and life will
be great! The same can be done for eRDF, with a profile attribute. I
want an inclusive approach to all of these things, and this inclusive
approach *includes* RDFa for all of the important use cases that are not
covered by other solutions.

I was under the impression you thought this was a cool idea [1].

Regardless, I would ask that you accept that, even if you don't see the
point of RDFa, many people do.

-Ben

[1] http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/133

Received on Tuesday, 30 May 2006 09:20:25 UTC