[uf-discuss] HTML5, Microformats and RDFa

[Manu Sporny]

There have been several threads discussing Microformats, RDFa and HTML5
that are occurring on the WHATWG mailing list. The discussion relates to
whether or not HTML5 should depend on the Microformats community to
solve HTML5's semantic markup issues, or if both Microformats and RDFa
should be considered for semantic web markup issues.

The start of the discussion is here:

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015860.html

and continues here:

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015875.html

I have authored a blog reply, stating that HTML5 should not depend on
the Microformats community to develop all semantic web vocabularies, the
reasoning can be viewed here:

http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/08/23/html5-rdfa-and-microformats/

and my first response to the WHATWG mailing list

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015949.html

Things start getting dicey here:

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015892.html

and here:

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015950.html

and my second response to the WHATWG mailing list, outlining some of the
shortcomings of Microformats and stating what differentiates RDFa in
it's approach:

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015957.html

Posting to this list because there are many on here that would be
interested in the WHATWG's current position on web semantics: "not
important enough to consider as part of the HTML language". Note that
the XHTML1.1 and XHTML2 workgroups have already accepted the position
that: "web semantics are important and a standard method of semantics
expression is necessary for the future development of the web".

-- manu