- From: Nathan <nathan@webr3.org>
- Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2011 01:07:26 +0100
- To: Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org>
- CC: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>, W3C TAG <www-tag@w3.org>
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