Re: RDFa and Web Directions North 2009

On Friday 13 February 2009, Ian Hickson wrote:
> To reiterate: I have approached and been approached by a number of
> people in the RDF and RDFa communities, and I have repeatedly asked
> for people to list problems and use cases that are of relevance in
> the context of RDFa and RDF, with those problem descriptions not
> mentioning RDFa or other technical solutions. So far we have seen
> *very few* of these.

I can't speak for the RDFa community, but the reason you can't see a lot 
of problem descriptions separate from technical solution is probably 
that the community feels that RDF is a well established technology, and 
so the focus is on showing how it is used rather than abstract 
speculation on how it could be used. There's a lot of that too, in 
research projects. What you're asking us to do amounts to describe a 
global hypertext system without mentioning HTML. That may have been an 
interesting exercise in 1992, but it seems like a waste of time today.

As for RDF use cases, please see e.g. 
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/

I do not particularly care about web applications, and I note that in 
modern frameworks, it is really simple to expose RDF data in Turtle or 
RDF/XML, so exposing meaning in HTML doesn't necessarily matter that 
much. I see standards writing not only as documenting what works, I 
feel it more important to create opportunities for further innovation, 
which goes beyond what was envisioned when creating the standard. I see 
that others find RDFa very useful, and I have a few hacks on the top of 
it as well. 

To me, the process you propose seems to place undue burden on 
innovation, and is likely to be outdated when it finally reaches 
Recommendation, as all the interesting use cases that motivated it has 
allready been implemented, most likely with competing technologies.

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil@kjernsmo.net
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/     OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC

Received on Friday, 13 February 2009 21:00:59 UTC