Re: Draft minutes for TAG telcon of 2011-06-16

Henry S. Thompson wrote:
> ISSUE-35 -- Microdata/RDFa relationship

Nice to see this being focussed on.

I have some concerns that the major background difference between the 
approaches, which resulted in two differing specifications, has not been 
given much focus. From Jeni's document:

   * RDFa allows entities to be assigned more than one type; microdata 
supports a maximum of one type

I firmly believe this is the key difference in approaches, microdata is 
primarily focused on using a classical "class blueprint" style of 
schema, where each class/type is set in stone, and has a fixed 
enumerable set of properties. Whereas RDF(a) mixes and matches from 
multiple vocabularies.

Whilst this only results in minor difference in the surface syntax, the 
mental model, processing model, and how the data is generated / consumed 
  / interacted with and consumed is very different.

My primary concern is that this may need to be addressed first of all, 
because if the different approaches are both needed, then two different 
surface syntaxes for the two styles may well be needed, and the possible 
TF may need to focus on clearly identifying the needs of both approaches 
to ensure that features from one don't creep in to the other making it 
unusable. If it isn't addressed, then the differences in background 
mental / schema models may be enough to make a merged single syntax 
useless/confusing for one or more parties.

>    TBL: The Task Force may fail -- but I don't want them to come back and
>    say "We succeeded -- no change is necessary"

+1, Can't stress that enough.

Best,

Nathan

Received on Saturday, 18 June 2011 22:46:10 UTC