Re: RDFa, FUD and ethics

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Stéphane Corlosquet
<scorlosquet@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> see http://groups.drupal.org/node/83914
>
> the claim is that newbies ... won't even realize
> it is on. ... we might be forcing them to get into the semantic
> web and find their data being reused in ways they might not have thought
> of.

If it's actually true that:

  "It does not surface more data than what's already on
   the page in HTML"[1]

Then how about a warning along the lines of:

 "Drupal defaults to being very open to optimize search
 engine results and promote data reuse. You can make Drupal
 more closed, but that might lower your search engine rankings.
 Here's how to close it up."

Note that that's a true (and important) statement whether you're
using RDFa or not. So there's no reason to even explain or even
mention the semantic web.

In the "close it up" link there could be a discussion of robots.txt
and turning off RDFa and (I suspect) a bunch of other admin
type stuff.

That said, are user profiles fully annotated by default? There
could be a middle ground where you get a user id embedded
on pages (enough to compare and query by page author, for
example) but not the full set of marked up FOAF information.
Wouldn't that get you most of the search engine goodness
without ensuring your name and friend lists show up in a Google
social graph query?

-cks

[1] http://groups.drupal.org/node/83914#comment-260339

Received on Monday, 9 August 2010 21:03:31 UTC