Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote:
My concern is: is RDFa really suitable for everyone and for Web
automation? My own answer, at first glance, is no. That's because
RDF(a)
can perhaps address nicely very niche needs, where determining how
much
data can be trusted is not a problem, but in general misuses AND
deliberate abuses may harm automation heavily
If your agent isn't going to trust the data gleaned from RDFa, then
why should it trust the data gleaned from the web page's natural
language? If the page has been authored by a reprobate that cannot be
trusted to put honest and correct data in a few RDFa attributes, why
should we trust their prose text?
An oft-quoted answer is that the prose text is "visible" whereas the
RDFa is somehow "invisible". Apart from the fact that UIs which make
use of data pulled in from RDFa will make this data visible, there is
also the fact that RDFa, unlike an external RDF/XML file, or some
metadata embedded in a <script> block, makes use of as much visible
data as possible: visible links, visible text, etc.
<p>My name is <span property="foaf:name"
about="#me">Toby Inkster</span>.</p>
If you can't trust someone to correctly mark up what their name is,
then why trust them to mark up what deserves <em>phasis? Why believe
the <address> they provide? What if the instance they marked up with
<dfn> is not really the defining one? What if a <var> is really a
constant?
--
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:m...@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
