- From: Toby A Inkster <mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 00:13:23 +0000
Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote: > My concern is: is RDFa really suitable for everyone and for Web > automation? My own answer, at first glance, is no. That's because > RDF(a) > can perhaps address nicely very niche needs, where determining how > much > data can be trusted is not a problem, but in general misuses AND > deliberate abuses may harm automation heavily If your agent isn't going to trust the data gleaned from RDFa, then why should it trust the data gleaned from the web page's natural language? If the page has been authored by a reprobate that cannot be trusted to put honest and correct data in a few RDFa attributes, why should we trust their prose text? An oft-quoted answer is that the prose text is "visible" whereas the RDFa is somehow "invisible". Apart from the fact that UIs which make use of data pulled in from RDFa will make this data visible, there is also the fact that RDFa, unlike an external RDF/XML file, or some metadata embedded in a <script> block, makes use of as much visible data as possible: visible links, visible text, etc. <p>My name is <span property="foaf:name" about="#me">Toby Inkster</span>.</p> If you can't trust someone to correctly mark up what their name is, then why trust them to mark up what deserves <em>phasis? Why believe the <address> they provide? What if the instance they marked up with <dfn> is not really the defining one? What if a <var> is really a constant? -- Toby A Inkster <mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
Received on Saturday, 3 January 2009 16:13:23 UTC