Re: The Complexity Argument (was: Re: Request to publish HTML+RDFa (draft 3) as FPWD)

On Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Manu Sporny wrote:
> 
> RDFa is more complex than Microformats and Microdata. It is more complex
> because the set of use cases are more complex. Follow-your-nose,
> vocabulary validation, data typing, and inferencing are just a few of
> the design goals for RDFa, based on the requirements in the use cases.

What are these use cases? I took into account every use case that was 
mentioned anywhere I could find, for microdata, and microdata handles 
every one of those that RDFa handles -- the only ones I didn't solve are 
also not solved by RDFa.


> It's fairly clear that RDFa is more complex than Microformats and
> Microdata, and I would say that is true because it solves a larger set
> of problems.

What problems? Could you list the concrete user problems that RDFa 
addresses that make it more complex, and which microdata doesn't address?


> To look at this another way, one could claim that HTML5, Javascript,
> canvas, or SVG is too complex for regular web authors.

Yeah, they are. We've spent a huge part of the effort on HTML5 trying to 
simplify as much as we could while still being compatible with the 
trillion or so deployed HTML pages. If you have any suggestions for ways 
we could further simplify the language, please let me know or file a bug.


> If you think RDFa is too complex, please propose an alternative or
> propose alternatives to the way RDFa works that are backwards compatible
> with XHTML+RDFa 1.0. We have some fairly large field deployments of RDFa
> and the number is growing, not shrinking.

What is your biggest deployment, in terms of volume of content processed 
or number of users affected?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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Received on Saturday, 19 September 2009 09:09:05 UTC