Re: how dirty can the HTML be, and still be RDFa?

On 11/28/11 3:59 AM, Dan Brickley wrote:
>> There is a basic contradiction. RDFa isn't main stream. RDFa will not be
>> main stream. The goal of WebID should be mass adoption without syntax level
>> distractions.
>>
>>> That's all the reason there is for the moment: it has all to do with
>>> interoperability.
>> Interoperability with what? Some niche?
>>
>> HTML+Microdata is aggressively promoted by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and
>> others. It already has far more tools, developers, and supporters than RDFa
>> will ever have. Thus, if you want interoperability RDFa specificity is an
>> implicit contradiction.
> You saw http://blog.schema.org/2011/11/using-rdfa-11-lite-with-schemaorg.html ?

Yes, of course.

>
> (I have amongst other things a Google contractor hat now, working on schema.org)
>
> Also http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2011Nov/0103.html
>
> What I'd rather see now, instead of gigantic mail threads in my inbox,
> is a nice tight well-packaged and tested .js library that reads RDFa,
> Microdata and sure Microformats2 as well. If half the angst about
> 'picking the winner' I see here could go into coding a format-agnostic
> HTML reader in .js, we'd all be a better place.

Yes.

We don't need to be in the business of picking winners re. syntax used 
to represent directed graphs. That's my fundamental point. Each syntax 
has its supporters and detractors, those realities should never creep in 
the conceptual aspect of a technical spec. Developers and end-users need 
to understand the concepts that underlie any endeavor en route to making 
full adoption style commitment. Intermingling a concept with its 
implementation details ultimately detracts from the concept in question. 
There will always be multiple ways of "skinning a rat" it's the act of 
"skinning" that ultimate matters .
>
> RDFa has taken on many of the design considerations that led to the
> Microdata fork being preferred for schema.org. It's a mistake to
> consider it "out of the game" because schema.org launched with
> Microdata instead of RDFa.

RDFa isn't out of the game. Neither is it solely in the game. All of 
these endeavors have their merits and demerits. Thus, by keeping them in 
the implementation box developers and users can simply choose what works 
best for them without coercion via favoritism in the main specs.

> But RDFa today wouldn't be as good as it
> now is, were it not for the existence of Microdata and the
> conversation with schema.org about simplification...

Correct and in a sense vice versa re. the emergence of Microdata :-) 
Competition always leads to better quality which is why monopolies are 
bad, all the time.

>
> Dan
>
>


-- 

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Kingsley Idehen 
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OpenLink Software
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