Steve Harris wrote:
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,
I believe HTML out there today will eventually be replaced by HTML
carrying Rich Metadata that has been encoded using RDFa or HTML5's
microdata feature.
Thanks to RDFa (in particular) I can now hold conversations with SEO
specialists about improving discoverability of Web pages via a few new
HTML tag properties. This kind of conversation simply couldn't happen
12 months ago.
I don't believe people craft HTML by hand, the biggest impact is going
to be with the generators of HTML who will be selfishly guided by
optimal placement in the indexes of Yahoo! and Google, at first. The
broader implications of the Web of Linked Data will follow from that
point onwards.
Kingsley
- Steve
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
