[microformats-discuss] Re: Education-ing Others

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi Joe & Scott,

For the record, this is *precisely* the sort of serious but civil  
discussion I was hoping to see on these lists.  I hope we can keep it  
that way. :-)

My perspective:

On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:44 AM, Joe Gregorio wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson <portletdev at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am looking for format definitions that are not tied to the
>> presentation layer so that I can effectively reuse them in the other
>> layers of my web application as well as within XML content
>> repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds,  
>> etc.
>
> What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
> can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
> within XML content repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP  
> messages, Atom feeds, etc."" ?

For data that is *never* intended for human consumption, and that is  
part of *private* communities with clearly-defined lines of  
authority, I think straight XML is actually a better solution.

However, I think Tantek was making his comments in the context of  
"The Web", as in the public, anarchic universe of human-readable  
documents.   For that world, I tend to agree with him: better to  
semantically annotate the existing content than duplicate everything  
in RDF or XML.  That seems the only solution that is likely to scale  
to non-experts, which I see as the critical success factor in *that*  
space.

-- Ernie P.