Re: The long road ahead

It's not a simple matter of 'putting the site onto github'; there's a
pile of software involved that needs reworking and rethinking before
it could usefully be shared. All the recent source files for additions
to schema.org are expressed in RDFa+RDFS and are available in the W3C
Mercurial repo. As you well know schema.org recently added JSON-LD
examples (around Actions); in general, discussing JSON-LD took time
out that could have gone on RDFa. There's also a first cut at RDFa
versions of schema.org's microdata examples in Mercurial at W3C too.
I'm looking to revisit that idea in a way that would support
translation into other languages, as well as alternate formats.

Microdata is published on 4+ million domains - reports of its death
are somewhat exaggerated, and inflamatory talk of 'downward spirals'
does nobody any favours. Microdata deserves a stable specification at
W3C; whether as REC, NOTE or a .txt file. The Microdata *API* on the
other hand does indeed appear to be on its way out - but let's try to
learn from that rather than use it for rhetorical point-scoring. This
would be a very very good time to revisit the question of a .js API
for structured data that abstracts away from the question of Microdata
vs RDFa 1.0 vs RDFa 1.1. Is http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-api/ dead? Any
lessons learned?

Dan

On 16 August 2013 14:50, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> Hey Dan, Chaals,
>
> I wanted to point out this thread on G+ about schema.org and how regular
> Web developers view what schema.org's preferences are wrt. RDFa Lite:
>
> https://plus.google.com/u/0/106943062990152739506/posts/aeBhzwBoa2q
>
> It was triggered by a blog post I did yesterday:
>
> http://manu.sporny.org/2013/microdata-downward-spiral/
>
> I know I keep harping on this, but it doesn't make it any less true:
>
> Web developers are going to use whatever the search engines tell them to
> use, and right now the message is clear: Use Microdata.
>
> Unfortunately, all of the fears I had about how schema.org was being
> built have now come to pass... the idea that Microdata is the only
> choice for schema.org is locked into many Web devs minds, and it's going
> to be very, very hard to undo the damage:
>
> http://manu.sporny.org/2011/false-choice/
>
> If you guys truly want to have a level playing field here, update the
> docs, add RDFa examples. We've offered countless times to help
> accelerate this process if you guys would just open the site up for
> public contribution via source control - please put the site on github -
> we'll help do these long overdue updates.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
> http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Friday, 16 August 2013 14:47:26 UTC