On Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:10:37 +0200, Scott Reynen <sc...@randomchaos.com>
wrote:
On Jul 18, 2010, at 6:38 AM, Oli Studholme wrote:
Out of curiosity what do you perceive are the different problems that
microformats and microdata are trying to solve?
Microformats aim to "solve a specific problem." Microdata aims to be
compatible with RDF, which demands more generic semantics.
Microdata doesn't go out of its way to be compatible with existing RDF
vocabularies, in fact I'd argue that the RDF extraction algorithm creates
some pretty ugly URIs that anyone who actually likes RDF would frown upon
and not want to use. In any event there's very little "RDFness" over the
syntax itself, the model is key-values, not triples.
Because of this, I doubt you'll ever see something like n optimization
in microdata. You've suggested that's a good thing because n
optimization doesn't make sense in all cases, but that's the crux of it:
microformats aren't trying to make sense in all cases, while microdata
is. n optimization isn't a good thing or a bad thing; it's simply a
reflection of different goals.
This isn't a difference between microformats and microdata. The microdata
vocabulary *had* the 'n' optimization, but it was removed after I showed
that it didn't work for e.g. Chinese or Vietnamese. I tried to learn from
this community why it isn't a bad idea, but there wasn't much useful
feedback. It really should be removed from microformats too, but that's
probably too late.
--
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software
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