[uf-discuss] Fwd: rdf as microformat?

[Danny Ayers]

On 10/27/05, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
> On Oct 26, 2005, at 2:42 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> >> http://research.talis.com/2005/erdf/wiki/Main/RdfInHtml
> >
> > I'm still trying to get my head around this, to figure out if this
> > is a useful direction or just a diversion.  On the one hand, it
> > seems pragmatic in that it only tries to represent those aspects of
> > RDF that fit naturally into HTML.  On the other hand, it seems
> > oriented around (opaque) URIs vs. full URLs -- if I understand it
> > correctly.

> Ian?

On holiday (offline!)  this week ;-)

He did an intro post on it at [1].

I suspect Ernie's captured the question of this from the RDF viewpoint
as well - "useful direction or just a diversion?". Jury's still out.

The RDF-in-HTML thing's been a pain just about as long as people have
been grumbling about RDF/XML syntax. It's even got its own W3C task
force/list [2]. Putting fairly arbitrary graph-shaped data in any kind
of friendly (generally tree-shaped) markup is difficult. The two
leading approaches (I believe) are and RDF/A [3] and  GRDDL [4]. RDF/A
isn't very far from microformats, but is mostly intended for XHTML
2.0.

GRDDL isn't a format as such, it provides a general processing
technique whereby XHTML can be interpreted as RDF, essentially sling
it through XSLT to RDF/XML. This is (almost) immediately applicable to
microformat data. But microformats are largely domain-specific, there
isn't the same generalization as (say) RDF/XML supports. Ian's trying
for an intermediate place, subsetting RDF so it's reasonable in XHTML
(1.0), but without throwing away the best bits.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://internetalchemy.org/2005/10/introducing-embedded-rdf
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/
[3] http://www.formsplayer.com/notes/rdf-a.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec


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