- From: Kristof Zelechovski <giecrilj@stegny.2a.pl>
- Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:04:06 +0200
- To: "'Manu Sporny'" <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>, "'Ian Hickson'" <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: "'WHAT-WG'" <whatwg@whatwg.org>, <www-archive@w3.org>
Web browsers are (hopefully) designed so that they run in every culture. If you define a custom vocabulary without considering its ability to describe phenomena of other cultures and try to impose it worldwide, you do more harm than good to the representatives of those cultures. And considering it properly does require much time and effort; I do not think you can have that off the shelf without actually listening to them. In a way, complaining that the Microformats protocol impedes innovation is like saying 'we are big and rich and strong, so either you accommodate or you do not exist'. Not that I do not understand; it is straightforward to say so and it happens all the time. Chris -----Original Message----- From: whatwg-bounces@lists.whatwg.org [mailto:whatwg-bounces@lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of Manu Sporny Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2008 3:50 AM To: Ian Hickson Cc: WHAT-WG; www-archive@w3.org Subject: Re: [whatwg] RDFa Problem Statement (was: Creative Commons Rights Expression Language) The Microformats community, and all communities like it, require a group of people to come together, collaborate and create a standard vocabulary to express ALL semantics. A somewhat strained analogy would be bringing in representatives from all of the cultures of the world and having them agree on a universal vocabulary. It is an untenable prospect, there is too much diversity in the world to agree on one master vocabulary. This is, however, the approach that Microformats has taken, for better or worse. When you do not scope vocabularies, like the Microformats community has chosen to do, you force new vocabulary development through a design bottleneck. This isn't a theoretical bottleneck, it is one that we deal with each day in the Microformats community. The RDFa approach is to remove this vocabulary development bottleneck by addressing the problem of creating a method of semantics expression. The web has always relied on distributed innovation and RDFa allows that sort of innovation to continue by solving the tenable problem of a semantics expression mechanism. Microformats has no such general purpose solution. In short, RDFa addresses the problem of a lack of a standardized semantics expression mechanism in HTML family languages. RDFa not only enables the use cases described in the videos listed above, but all use cases that struggle with enabling web browsers and web spiders understand the context of the current page. -- manu -- Manu Sporny President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: Bitmunk 3.0 Website Launches http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/07/03/bitmunk-3-website-launches
Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2008 07:07:08 UTC