Re: Shut down the RDFa/Microdata Task Force initiative

Harry Halpin wrote:
> it still seems inherently to do a disservice to Web
> developers and the users of the Web to have two (three if you count
> microformats, which I would) divergent ways of putting data - say
> contact info - into a web-page.

minor note, there are way more than three ways actively being used 
around the web:

  - Microdata
  - RDFa (1 and 1.1)
  - Microformats
  - <meta> and <link> (like DC. usage and opengraph)
  - data-* attributes
  - rdf/xml in comments
  - turtle/n3 in <script> blocks

We can perhaps discount the last two as out of scope, and possibly even 
the data-* attributes, however the first four are definitely active and 
competing rather than complementing.

Alas, I personally can't see any technical reason why those four can't 
all be unified or at least made to complement / extend one another.

On the 1-2 year timeline things are going to be rather a mess, if 
metadata in HTML is important, then we need to look at the 5-10 year 
timeline.

This leads me to suggest that framing this as an "RDFa/Microdata" task 
force and problem is probably too little too late, and a waste of 
people's time (particularly around political matters). It may have 
worked back in 2009, can't see it standing a chance now.

Perhaps though, it's an ideal time to learn some lessons, see what 
people actually are using and how they are using it, then plan a unified 
solution for 2016 onwards. Or perhaps it's just best to sit back and see 
what happens, then standardize the intersection / superset - which is a 
little bit ironic giving these are solutions from a standardization body 
- but it may not hurt too much.

Best,

Nathan

Received on Saturday, 13 August 2011 00:08:33 UTC