[uf-discuss] Today, Tomorrow, and Someday Problems

[Manu Sporny]

Martin McEvoy wrote:
>> http://halindrome.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-we-do-what-we-do.html
>>   
> Thanks Manu for an interesting post, I have made some comments ;-)
> I am a bit worried  about Shane's other post
>
>> Shane wrote:
>> Unlike microformats, the idiom for annotating your content does not
>> conflict with the normal semantics of (X)HTML (e.g., the class
>> attribute, the title attribute, and abbr).
> 
> Sound's like a declaration of war from a community who wants to bring
> Microformats to the fold.

I've been working with Shane to get this "Microformats expression using
RDFa" mechanism operational. I can assure you that his statements are
absolutely not any sort of "declaration of war". Please refrain from
using loaded language - it mis-characterizes and over-dramatizes his post.

We're not talking about a terrible conflict involving loss of life.
We're talking about a difference in opinion regarding web semantics
expression - it's really geeky stuff. :)

Shane has spent the most amount of time out of all of us in the RDFa and
Microformats communities writing up our thoughts on Microformats
expression using RDFa:

http://rdfa.info/wiki/RDFa_Vocabularies

He wouldn't be doing that if he wanted to harm this community in any
way. We're trying to bring the two communities together - not push them
apart.

>> Why would you want to use RDFa? For the same reason you want to use
>> microformats. Because you care about machines understanding what is on
>> your page, not just humans.
> 
> Is it not the other way around in the microformats community?

As Sarven stated, the RDFa community and the Microformats community
goals are the same - to enable widespread use of semantics in web
documents. While the paths that both communities have taken are
different, the destination is the same.

-- manu