Re: the "a" in "RDFa"?

Bjoern is exactly right. (At least on the naming...not about it being
a silly endeavour. :)

In its early days it was called RDF/XHTML, since it was devised as an
XHTML serialisation of RDF. So yes, you are right that the idea was
that RDF/x denoted a way of writing RDF. This was never really
satisfactory, since the idea was always to allow the same technique to
be used in other XML languages.

Since one of the key components of technique was to be able to
'decorate' normal mark-up with meta data via attributes, then RDF/a
soon became preferable, with the only reason for changing from RDF/a
to RDFa being based on nothing more than Google searches, I'm afraid.

All the best,

Mark


On 29/01/07, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> * Bob DuCharme wrote:
> >Where did the name RDFa (or before it, RDF/a) come from? Take "RDF" and
> >add an "a"--why? Does it mean "assertion"? Or does it represent the HTML a
> >element, which is a popular element in RDFa syntax for wrapping PCDATA to
> >make oy the object of an RDF triple? Or does it stand for a slightly
> >altered fork of RDF the way you might add step 2a between step 2 and step
> >3?
>
> Well, RDF/XML is RDF encoded as XML, RDF/N3 is RDF encoded as Notation3,
> and RDF/A is RDF sillily encoded as yet more [a]ttributes.
> --
> Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
> Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
> 68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/
>
>
>


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Received on Monday, 29 January 2007 14:17:13 UTC