On 10 Jul 2009, at 15:36, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
Steve Harris wrote:
On 10 Jul 2009, at 14:31, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
Steve et. al,
If we are going to take the "how the Web was born" theme re.
figuring out the path forward, then what's wrong with RDFa? If
people sort of know how to write HTML, why not show them how to
add rich metadata via RDFa? That said, we have a deeper problem
re. Linked Data, and in my opinion it starts not fulling
expressing the essence of the matter with clarity. The fundamental
issues are
RDFa doesn't generally solve the Syntax complexity problem.
It solves the "groking what your actually doing"problem for those
who author HTML docs.
Perhaps, but I'm not totally convinced. I think the mapping between
RDFa and triples is sufficiently complex that it may not help.
Though, possibly RDFa documents that are not "nice" HTML (ie. not
really readable by humans) could be quite hacker-friendly. I've
been meaning to look into this.
RDFa is the best starting point for enhancing Metadata carried by an
HTML document. Once you understand that you are describing
something, and that you do so using Subject, Predicate, Object
statements, the essence of the matter is much much clearer.
If people make the leap between RDFa syntax and triples, yes.
Once high level annotation tools for embedding RDFa in HTML are
unleashed, this whole matter will become much clearer to a very
broad spectrum of Web users :-)
Now, that I definitely disagree with. The broad spectrum of web users
do not edit HTML, and I would guess that the majority of HTML out
there is machine generated. At least in part.
That's not to say that I think such a tool is a bad idea, I don't, but
that it wont be any kind of universal panacea.
- Steve
