Re: RDFa actions in web browsers (UI)

Manu,

This strikes me as precisely the wrong way to do things. The point about
expressing structured data is that you want to express structure, and
then you let the user do whatever they want with it. For example, you
express an address, and the user may map it on Google Maps, or store it
in his GIS database, or compare to his address book and see if he has a
phone number for that address, etc....

In other words, the actions should *not* be decided by the publisher of
the data in the first place. Otherwise, what's the point of providing
interoperable structured data? Tightly coupling data with actions is the
old web. Loose coupling, where you take structured data and do whatever
your browser allows you to do with it, that's the data web.

What do you think?

-Ben

PS: That said, if one really wants to use RDFa to do this, then just
come up with a vocabulary.... :)


Manu Sporny wrote:
> There is an interesting discussion happening on the microformats-discuss
> mailing list on if/how actions on semantic data should be defined by
> website publishers:
> 
> http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-August/010526.html
> 
> This discussion is important as we are attempting to create a
> browser-agnostic method of marking up actions for semantic data
> specified as Microformats, eRDF or RDFa. This discussion assumes that we
> want to give publishers the power to define semantic data actions.
> 
> If a method is being defined to give publishers the power to specify
> semantic data actions, somebody from the RDFa community should probably
> be involved. :)
> 
> -- manu
>

Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2007 16:17:49 UTC