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

[Danny Ayers]

On 10/25/05, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> 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.

I can only speak for myself, but if you *can* conveniently write the
data in HTML (in a parseable fashion, etc etc) then I'd rather have it
that way. Worst case is Tidy+XSLT.

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

Sorry, that doesn't work. RDF is optimised for modelling things and
relationships between them. HTML is optimised for rendering documents.

> > How are Google Maps satellite pictures stored?  Pixel-by-pixel CSS
> > classes?
>
> JPEGs. It is image data, HTML would be highly inappropriate.

Quite. I think the same applies for a large proportion of data found
in databases today, much of which could be usefully exposed on the
Web.

(I assume you
> meant HTML classes; if not, what are "CSS classes"?)

Yep.

Cheers,
Danny.



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