On May 29, 2006, at 8:48 PM, Dan Connolly wrote:
Yes, there are. Lots of them.
Please look around before you jump to conclusions and spread
misinformation.
Fair enough, Dan. I apologize for missing this.
I would like to ask that you be just as careful when you're talking
about RDFa. Your last two emails are incomplete and thus incorrect.
Remember the RDFa requirements (a subset here, for clarity):
1) publisher independence in picking vocabularies
2) in-context metadata with copy-and-paste
3) expressing metadata about embedded objects and fragments of pages
GRDDL doesn't provide (2). Microformats don't provide (1) and (3).
eRDF doesn't provide (2) and (3).
I hope that, next time you suggest GRDDL or MFs or eRDF, you point
out these three important pieces of information. RDFa was created for
a number of important reasons, reasons I've discussed with you in
private and on this mailing list many times. Please remember these
points in the future, even if you disagree with them. Without
pointing them out, you're misleading folks by claiming that they
"might as well" use other solutions.
Yes, it's clear you prefer everything but RDFa. But no, these
solutions are not all the same. MFs might be enough in some cases.
GRDDL might be enough in some cases. eRDF might be enough in some
cases. These are all great contributions that have their place. But
they are not replacements for RDFa, and there are a *lot* of
legitimate uses of RDFa, in particular Creative Commons (50M pages
and growing), semantic wikis, etc....
[...]
rel="tag" is certainly simpler than RDFa or eRDF or GRDDL or any
of the other markup idioms in this space and it's pretty widely
deployed. I don't look forward to trying to change author habits
for that sort of thing.
And yet you too are trying to change authors' habits, by having them
add a PROFILE attribute when that is clearly not the current
practice. I think it's a great idea, but you can't have your cake and
eat it, too. Either you accept what authors are doing exactly as is,
or you try to change their habits. Clearly, what authors are
currently doing is not enough, according to your own efforts.
I think you and I agree here: there is a problem with scalability if
you don't ground your concepts in URIs *somehow*. So, when
microformat users start adding a PROFILE attribute, then GRDDL will
work, and so will hGRDDL for converting microformats into RDFa, and
then all the RDFa tools can read microformats and preserve metadata
context, and life will be great! The same can be done for eRDF, with
a profile attribute. I want an inclusive approach to all of these
things, and this inclusive approach *includes* RDFa for all of the
important use cases that are not covered by other solutions.
I was under the impression you thought this was a cool idea [1].
Regardless, I would ask that you accept that, even if you don't see
the point of RDFa, many people do.
-Ben
[1] http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/133
