[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:

> > A relational model of data that uses URIs as keys is the bottom line.
> > Doesn't matter what that looks like as a file format, as long as the
> > URIs are in there somewhere.
>
> IMHO, that's the mistake. There doesn't need to be a relational model of
> data using URIs as keys.

So, how will HTTP work without URIs? How will hypertext work without links?
The Web is already a graph-shaped data structure (hence the name) with
relations between the nodes.

> Humans don't use URIs as keys.

Except when they use the Web.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/intro/intro.html#h-2.1
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.2

> Now, sometimes you do want to help the computers a bit, so that you can do
> slightly more with it. That's where microformats like hCard and hCalendar
> come in; they let you take data from well-known data formats (vCard and
> iCalendar here) and publish that data directly in HTML in a way that can
> be treated both as simple HTML, and as their original format (via a simple
> reverse format translation) -- the latter of which lets you stick the data
> straight into existing systems like your address book or calendar program.
>
> But you don't need to go any further than that, IMHO. And certainly humans
> don't want to go any further than that.

Ok, here's the difference of opinion, or ambitions or whatever. As a
human user of the Web, I'm fed up with having to use a myriad of
different applications with limited interoperability between them. As
you say, sometimes it does make sense to help the computer a bit. I
personally think that the easiest way of doing that is to build on Web
components - by which I mean primarily the naming scheme, URIs.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com