Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
...
Solutions for this already exist; embedded N3 in a <script> tag, just
to name something that Ian already mentioned, allows you to mash RDF
data into a page in a machine-extractable way, and brings in any of
the specific ancillary benefits of RDF.
...
Well, it'll require an N3 parser where previously none was needed. Also,
it separates the metadata from the text, a situation most people want to
avoid.
This may work, but as far as I can tell, the use of <script> for "data
blocks" is an afterthought -- for instance, it's described in a section
about, well, Scripting.
So, is anybody using this successfully in practice?
...
Not quite correct. Again, the problem of embedded shareable data in a
web page has been solved multiple times. The specific problem of
sharing *RDF* data (due to needing/wanting the specific benefits RDF
can offer) has also been solved. What are the precise problems that
require *RDFa* as a solution?
...
Could you elaborate a bit on these solutions?
My understanding was that RDFa has been produced in order to address
problems with other approaches, such as using <meta> elements, eRDF, or
microformats.
If there is a *successful* alternative to RDFa that does not require new
attributes, please let us know :-).
...
Well, there are many things that would offer more advantages than
disadvantages by themselves. We can't possibly include all of them in
the spec; you can think about this as including a hidden large
disadvantage of 'will grow the size of the spec and the amount of work
implementors have to do'. Thus the advantages must generally be
significantly larger than the disadvantages; this is why the best
argument for including something in the spec is often "there are
already widespread hacks to accomplish this". <video>, for example,
was included based on pretty much precisely that argument.
...
Reminder: RDFa is one of the things the (W3C) Working Group's Charter
mentions as candidate for inclusion (either by a generic extensibility
mechanism, or otherwise by extending the language):
"The HTML WG is encouraged to provide a mechanism to permit
independently developed vocabularies such as Internationalization Tag
Set (ITS), Ruby, and RDFa to be mixed into HTML documents."
<http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html#other>
> ...
Best regards, Julian
