Re: Review for RDFa Primer

Justin Thorp wrote:
> Ben, I had read the previous draft that you had sent to the WG a few
> weeks ago.  First off, great job!!!  I thought you gave a really
> thoughtful intro of how to do RDFa.

Thanks!

> As Joe Developer, I wanna know how does RDFa relate to microformats?
> Is RDFa a replacement for microformats?  Do they work together
> somehow? 

Manu Sporny is currently writing up a document that explains why his
group needed more than microformats and chose RDFa. He's also writing up
how their final solution uses both.

Microformats and RDFa have a few similar goals: sprinkling in structure
inside HTML. There are two key differences:

1) Microformats do it top-down: vocabularies are designed, formalized
and approved centrally. RDFa does it bottom-up, just like RDF: anyone
can define a vocabulary, mix and match properties from various
vocabularies, etc.

2) Microformats do not have consistent syntax from one vocabulary to the
next, because they constrain themselves to existing HTML4 attributes.
RDFa introduced new attributes so that the syntax can remain the same,
it's only the vocabularies that change. In short, this makes writing an
RDFa parser a one-time thing, whereas building a microformat parser may
require updates as new vocabularies are defined. RDFa is trying to be
more generic.

> Also... after I code up my contact info and events with RDFa, what
> does that mean for me?  What tools are out there now that work with
> RDFa?  How is it going to make my life and the life of my users
> better?

This is, of course, the hardest part to describe, because there's a
chicken-and-egg problem: publish structure, so tools can pick it up.
Build the tools so people will publish structure.

That said, there are some interesting examples of browser-side tools
that show you a hint of the power you can get. Here's one example, the
Operator Firefox extension picking up RDFa and letting you take action
on it:

http://wiki.digitalbazaar.com/en/Firefox_Operator_Extensions

Mark also demo'ed his tools at the F2F, and there's the JavaScript
bookmarklets which show you can easily extend to pick up specific
metadata you're interested in:

http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/impl/js/

We expect many more cool tools to emerge now that we're closing in on a
final spec.

-Ben

Received on Tuesday, 9 October 2007 23:23:08 UTC