[uf-discuss] RDFa Basics video (8 minutes)

[Guillaume Lebleu]

Manu Sporny wrote:
> Constructive feedback would be great, as I'll probably be doing the
> "advanced" RDFa tutorial in a month or so, and will need to know what
> worked and what didn't in the RDFa Basics video.
>
>   
I'm relatively new to RDFa and this is a great introduction. I'm 
probably going to say things you've already heard, so please bear with me.
For someone like me who has learnt to value the accessibility of 
standards, the brutally honest takeaway of your introduction is that 
RDFa does what microformats do and probably more (otherwise why would it 
exist?), but not clear what exactly and plus it requires XHTML 2.0 and 
complex syntax. So, when comparing uf and RDFa, adopting RDFa seems a 
huge leap of faith and a lot of work considering it requires XHTML 2.0 
and your introduction does not mention any application supporting RDFa...
So, if the goal of this video is to evangelize RDFa to a large audience, 
I think it would be great to explain why (ex. why id, class and 
a/href/rel haven't been leveraged more to represent RDF triples) and 
also explain how an implementation can best leverage the 
backward-compatibility/evolutionary benefits of microformats with the 
RDFa more formalist and consistency with other w3 standards.
Last, if you believe like me that applications drive standards, not the 
reverse, then I think what will ultimately get people excited is to have 
a demonstration of how this content can be leveraged by an application 
once published and gathered in a RDF store. In an ideal world, putting a 
aside resource constraints issues, if I had to evangelize RDFa, I would 
start with the application, for instance showing content in a browser, 
then showing how it's possible to type queries against this content in a 
browser plugin. Then only I would show the implementation, and at the 
end possibly, adoption numbers such as how many people have downloaded 
the plugin so far.
My 2 cents.
Guillaume