[uf-discuss] HTML5, Microformats and RDFa

[Manu Sporny]

Scott Reynen wrote:
> I think comparing RDFa to microformats actually hurts your argument by
> suggesting they solve the same problem and reinforcing the notion that
> the wider problem RDFa seeks to solve is unimportant.  Rather, I would
> interpret the mentions of microformats as an indication that people are
> missing the wider problem RDFa would solve, and focus on making that
> clearer, by talking about what RDFa does that microformats don't even
> attempt to do.

Scott, Ben - thanks for the feedback, both of you make some very good
points and I've adjusted my argumentation a bit to follow advice
expressed by both of you. Things are being clarified in some ways on the
HTML5 list and muddied in others.

The one thing that is clear is that most of those on the list are not as
up-to-speed with web semantics as either this community or the RDFa
community would expect. Certainly, I was a bit blind-sided by some of
the false assertions those on the list were making about semantics in
general.

The very long thread continues,

RDFa Problem Statement and Features
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015957.html

Intro to RDFa
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015974.html

RDFa markup consistency
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015992.html

CSS-based approach to semantic data on the Web (Microformats and RDFa)
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015996.html

Of particular note is the last thread - the CSS-based approach to
semantic data markup. It's a proposal that, while interesting, ignores
the hard work that this community and the RDFa community has done over
the past several years. I could be mis-reading the various threads, so
some feedback from this list would be appreciated.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.0 Website Launches
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/07/03/bitmunk-3-website-launches