[microformats-discuss] FYI: two posting about the Semantic Web, the "SynWeb", scraping and microformats

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Danny Ayers wrote:
> 
> But the point I was trying to make was that Google Local or whatever 
> doesn't (as far as I know) get people to look through all their 
> documents to find the data for every query, they use some sort of 
> database.

Google caches the data on its servers for performance reasons, of course, 
but the data's primary format is HTML on the Web. The fact that there are 
computer systems that process this HTML into intermediate forms before 
returning them to users in another form of HTML (in the case of Google 
Maps, a DHTML map) is an implementation detail.

The point is that the Semantic Web model would have us writing RDF (as 
XML, or N3, or RDF/A, or some other RDF serialisation), instead of having 
us just write HTML.

RDF is optimised for computer consumption. HTML is optimised for human 
consumption. Therefore we should be using HTML.


> How are Google Maps satellite pictures stored?  Pixel-by-pixel CSS 
> classes?

JPEGs. It is image data, HTML would be highly inappropriate. (I assume you 
meant HTML classes; if not, what are "CSS classes"?)

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