Re: Community outreach with a cheat sheet!

Shane...everyone,

We have to be a little careful here, though. Microformats were
supposed to be about creating small sets of rules that could be
applied by authors to their documents, to add semantics. The *actual*
semantics were invariably gained by looking elsewhere, the so-called
'paving the cow-path' approach.

So hCard came from vCard...and we disappear up our own semantic
worm-holes if we now define a namespace for hCard as a vocabulary, to
be used in RDFa!

My take on this is that we have to unroll Microformats a little, and
perhaps look at what it was intended to do in the first place--go back
to first principles. It was not intended as a way to create
vocabularies, but rather a way to easily document compact formats that
authors could easily grok.

I blogged over the weekend along these lines [1], showing how the
rel-license microformat is *exactly* the same as using @rel="license"
in RDFa, and I think that would be a far more productive area to look
at; how far can we go in documenting and teaching people about 'micro'
formats, or small bite-size pieces of RDFa.

Regards,

Mark

[1] <http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/2008/03/so-how-about-using-rdfa-in-microformats.html>

On 25/03/2008, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com> wrote:
>
>  I think the right thing to do would be to help the owners of those
> vocabularies define RDFa versions.  However, given that there is no rule
> about how you "define" an RDFa vocabulary, I think it is safe to say URL
> http://mumblefoo maps to hCard as defined HERE.  To create semantics in RDFa
> documents for hCard, define a prefix and go.  For example:
>
>  <html xmlns:hc="http://mumblefoo" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
>  ...
>  <span rel="hc:tel">
>     <spal rel="hc:type">home</span>
>     <span rel="hc:value">+1.763.555.1212</span>
>  </span>
>
>  I mean - doesn't this just work?  (tm)
>
>
>  David Peterson wrote:
>  Hello Ben,
>
> That is what was what I had intended. I did not want to re-invent anything,
> just wanted to highlight a XFN to RDFa mapping. I was giving an example from
> the XFN microformat [1].
>
> -----------------
> XFN 1.1
> rel="contact"
> rel="acquaintance"
> rel="friend"
> rel="met"
> rel="co-worker"
> - snip -
> -----------------
>
> My example URI (http://rdfa.info/2008/03/xfn#co-worker)
> probably stank, but that is why I am bringing it up here so I (we) can get
> started.
>
> The main reason I want to kick this off is for an article I am writing for
> SitePoint on how microformatters can benefit from RDFa whilst using what is
> familiar. Yahoo! will only be indexing 5 of the 98 or so and FireFox 3
> parses the same 5 I believe. So, when SearchMonkey kicks in there will be a
> lot of unhappy campers -- that is until we Semantify 'Em!
>
> So maybe XFN wasn't the best example to pick. Yahoo! will extract: hCard,
> hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. What would be a better vocab?
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
> [1] http://gmpg.org/xfn/11
>
>
>
>  -----Original Message-----
> From: Ben Adida [mailto:ben@adida.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, 26 March 2008 1:25 AM
> To: David Peterson
> Cc: 'Shane McCarron'; 'Ivan Herman'; 'W3C RDFa task force'
> Subject: Re: Community outreach with a cheat sheet!
>
> David Peterson wrote:
>
>
>  http://rdfa.info/2008/03/xfn#co-worker
>
>  I'd prefer if we worked on re-using existing vocabularies rather than
> re-inventing them wholesale :) But, of course, the beauty of RDFa is
> that I have no say :)
>
> -Ben
>
>
>
>
>  --
> Shane P. McCarron Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120
> Managing Director Fax: +1 763 786-8180
> ApTest Minnesota Inet: shane@aptest.com
>
>
>


-- 
  Mark Birbeck

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Received on Tuesday, 25 March 2008 16:49:53 UTC