RDF in HTML

Dear all!

It seems like RDF is approaching a conclusion, and everybody will
naturally rush to convert their metadata to RDF. :-) At least I will.

How to insert RDF in HTML is naturally connected to inserting XML in HTML,
so I read <URL:http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-xh> some time ago. Thinking about
it, I'm not sure I liked the suggestions there. So I checked to see if
there has been any discussions about it here, since it states that it is
for discussion only, and that it should be here, but I couldn't find any.
So I hope to start one.

It seems like the conclusion for RDF is that it should be kept in external
files. Obviously, much of the metadata of a site will be something valid
for an entire site or at least for a group of documents, and for that
kind of data, an external file is great. However, some information will
vary from document to document, and creating an external metadata
file for each document would be rather bothersome to me. My site(s) aren't
huge, but I have not found any authoring tools I like, so I do everything
by hand (except for a few things I do with tools I wrote myself). I think
it is limited how many files I can have in a directory before it gets too
chaotic, so increasing the number of files by a factor of 2 is not a
good thing. 

Also, introducing new elements at this point doesn't feel right either. By
the time a new version of HTML is up, I will probably create all new
documents using XML, which means there'll be only invalid HTML
documents on my site.... Which would be true for inserting RDF inline too. 
Unless someone is thinking about making a HTML4.1 recommendation? :-)

When I first heard about RDF a long time ago, I thought it would be
inserted about the way PICS is inserted today, e.g.
<META NAME="RDF" CONTENT='<rdf: ..... '>
It is clearly problematic, but is it impossible to get valid HTML this
way? Are there some characters that would need escaping? Things like that?

(BTW, I guess the new HTML WG didn't have it's first meeting in October
1988 as it says on the activity statement :-) )

Friendly Tiddely-pom,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Graduate astronomy-student                    Problems worthy of attack
University of Oslo, Norway            Prove their worth by hitting back
E-mail: kjetikj@astro.uio.no                                - Piet Hein
Homepage <URL:http://www.astro.uio.no/~kjetikj/>
Webmaster@skepsis.no

Received on Friday, 13 November 1998 15:10:09 UTC