Ian Hickson wrote:
The question we should be discussing is not "should it work?" (because
it already does), but rather, "should it validate?"
No, the question is "what problem are we solving?". Talking about RDFa,
RDF, eRDF, Microformats, and so forth doesn't answer this question.
The question "should it validate" is the question "do we want to solve the
problem and is this the right solution", which is a question we can't
answer without actually knowing what the problem is.
So far, all I really know is that the problem is apparently obvious.
My understanding of the use-case, based on discussions so far, is:
- Allow authors to embed annotations in HTML documents such that RDF
triples can be unambiguously extracted from human-readable data without
duplicating the data, and thus ensuring that the machine-readable data
and the human-readable data remain in sync.
The disconnect you're facing is that the proposers of RDFa consider the
ability to encode RDF triples to be a goal, while you consider RDF
triples to be a solution to a (as-yet-undetermined) higher-level
problem. They take RDF as a given, while you do not. They have already
solved some problems with RDF and wish only to adapt this generalized
solution to work in HTML, while you wish to re-solve all of these
problems from the ground up.
Would you agree with this analysis?
If this is accurate, then it's difficult to see how continued discussion
on this topic can be productive.
