- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:10:59 -0500
- To: RDFa mailing list <public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>, RDFa Community <public-rdfa@w3.org>
Hi all, I had the pleasure of teaching a 4 hour workshop on RDFa and giving a high-level talk on RDFa and the semantic web at this year's Web Directions North[1] conference. I'll post the presentation material later in the month. If none of you have been to a Web Directions conference before, you should try going if there is one near you - it was absolutely fantastic - very non-corporate, great topics, fantastically organized. Lots of webheads from W3C, Opera, IE, Google, Yahoo, and others that are heavily involved in using standards to build the next generation web. What follows is some feedback that I got from the workshop and talk on RDFa. Conference attendees were primarily a mix of web designers and developers. I take no position on any of the feedback, just relaying it so that others on the list can comment. The Workshop ------------ Most everyone that attended the workshop was familiar with Microformats, were using them in their website, and wanted to learn more about RDFa. All of them seemed to understand RDFa, CURIEs, namespaces, chaining, bnodes, hanging @rels, etc. by the end of the workshop. Having not known anything about RDF and RDF/XML when starting the workshop, they seemed to leave with a fairly solid understanding of RDFa. XHTML and HTML5 --------------- While many people were using XHTML1 in their demos to perform markup, there were many more designers and web developers that thought that HTML5 was the next version of (X)HTML. There was a great deal of buzz around HTML5 and nobody that I spoke to mentioned that they were in the least bit excited about XHTML2, even when asked directly. HTML5 was mentioned in presentations and conversations throughout the week. The general feeling was that HTML5 was far more exciting than XHTML2. Most seemed to hate the term "RDFa" ----------------------------------- Many confused RDFa with RDF/XML and even more confused RDF/XML with RDF. Web developer understanding surrounding the differences between RDF, RDF/XML and RDFa are a mess. People got it after the talk, but several made the suggestion that we re-brand RDFa because "it's different from RDF and there are really bad connotations associated with RDF". "It sounds way too technical." were some of the other comments - it really scared web designers. They also didn't like the W3C semantic web icon and seemed to feel the same about the W3C site in general, several mentioned that they "felt like I was looking at a website from the late 1990s" (note that most of the negative comments came from web designers). RDFa Website and Blog --------------------- There were many comments about how the Microformats website looked far more professional and was far more useful at presenting information than the RDFa blog and wiki. There were several complaints about it being nearly useless and universally scary for web designers that are just starting out with web semantics. RDFa Wizards and Templates -------------------------- "It would be really nice if I could just go to a site and start filling out a form to generate RDFa for people/places/events/etc.". This was repeated on every day of the conference - we've been talking about it for some time, but have not gotten it done yet. Seems to be a great need for this. Namespaces weren't an issue --------------------------- I made it a point to ask people directly if the xmlns:foaf=XYZ prefixing mechanism scared or confused them and not a single person said that it did. Most seemed to feel as if it were a fairly normal mechanism to define a prefix. Granted, they didn't know the alternatives, but not once did I have an argument about why we have namespaces in RDFa. That being said, most said that they understood why we have namespaces... BUT, having no namespaces was easier to understand. Most seemed to understand the vocabulary scaling problem inherent with Microformats. SVG + RDFa ---------- Doug Schepers worked RDFa into his SVG presentation, using it to describe people in an image such as "pretty", "tubby", "skinny", "bald". He wanted the ability to tag areas of an image and attach semantic attributes or descriptions to the image. This has some fairly powerful implications for people with disabilities, such as the ability to mark up areas on a graphical map as "water", or "land", or "forest", or "bus stop", etc. using RDFa. A thermal printer would take this data and then add physical semantics to the map that is printed out based on the semantics (braille, water texture, etc.) Overall the feedback on RDFa was very positive and many stated that they were going to go back and try messing around with it a bit more. -- manu [1] http://north.webdirections.org/ -- Manu Sporny President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
Received on Monday, 9 February 2009 04:11:17 UTC