Re: Adding Semantic Metadata to Webpages' Elements via CSS Selectors

Sarven Capadisli,
All,

I see your point about "data" versus "metadata". The RDFa primer describes "adding structured data to documents directly". The RDFa Wikipedia article [1] uses the term "metadata", per "embedding rich metadata".

With respect to being able to express statements about document elements, I remember that there is a clever bit where one can use the RDFa "about" attribute to refer to a URI fragment of the element using its "id" attribute. I think that this resembles:

<p id="p123" about="#p123" ... >...</p>

This clever bit, or something similar, would seemingly be involved for a more "apples to apples" comparison between RDFa with the indicated technique (though the indicated technique doesn't require an "id" attribute to use a "this()" or "self()" function for selected elements...).

The comparison with RDFa (which I hadn't initially considered) has been fruitful. As a result of this discussion, I added a "content()" function to the sketch, e.g., "content()", "content('text')", "content('xml')", "context('html')", to refer to selected elements' inner text, XML, or HTML contents as literals. Drawing inspiration from RDFa, this could reduce redundancy and enable the utilization of elements' inner contents in statements.

I was recently exploring uses of styling markup for scenarios beyond document layout and presentation and that is when these ideas occurred [2]. However, these ideas should be useful for websites and webpages.

These ideas combine the power of CSS selectors with the (as of yet theoretical) capability to additively attach multiple statements to elements. Resultant graphs or datasets would, then, be able to be accessed and retrieved using the CSSOM per a style property (e.g., "metadata" or "about").

As considered, these ideas resemble a rules system for attaching statements to markup elements.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa
[2] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1594#issuecomment-4235095851