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More on RDFa
This is from an email I wrote to clarify my concerns with the existence of RDFa. It was in response to an email prompted by my post on the premature creation of standards in the microcontent space.
I had looked at RDFa and I agree it’s not all that complicated, in fact RDF as a basic technology isn’t really that complicated. Where RDF fails is the semantic web vision and the complexity pulled in by trying to build a globally scalable data framework. To me that’s too aggressive of an approach for real world adoption. Anyone who actually gets out in the field and works with average skill level developers will know that a disturbingly large percentage are still struggling with simple XML, let alone the ideas behind RDF. The RDF vision is great and I don’t dispute the theoretical value of it, my problem with it is born 100% from the fact that I just don’t believe it can succeed outside the realm of the above average skill level developers who are already interested in it. That’s basically been my opinion since I read the early working drafts for the RDF specs and I’ve seen nothing since then that’s allowed me to think otherwise. I’m always looking.
Now, that being said, I will admit that RDFa is the cleanest use of RDF I’ve seen. It does have some potential, but it’s crippled in the short term by the dependence on XHTML 2.0 and in the long term by the fact you still need to understand the big picture of RDF to really leverage it. I know there is some work to try to fit it into XHTML 1.0, but that 2.0 issue is a really big risk. If people start evangelizing this as the “standard” way of doing microcontent and it depends on XHTML 2.0 and XHTML 2.0 isn’t widely used yet then that means people will wait to deploy microcontent based applications and that’s simply something that I can’t stand to see. That’s exactly what happened with XQuery and native XML databases, everybody got caught up waiting for XQuery to be finished and stopped innovating on alternative solutions. Is XQuery really the right language for managing XML data? I’m not convinced that it is, nor am I convinced that RDF is the right way of managing microcontent. Hence, why I consider it very damaging that the W3C is already playing in a space where quite frankly, they aren’t wanted. It’s fine if it’s being worked on for a specific creative commons use case, but I’m already seeing it being evangelized as a competitor to microformats and other forms of microcontent and that’s what I find troubling.
This entry was posted by Kimbro Staken on Friday, June 2nd, 2006 at 11:23 am and is filed under XML, Microcontent, Microformats, Structured Blogging. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.
June 6th, 2006 at 9:26 am
“Where RDF fails is the semantic web vision and the complexity pulled in by trying to build a globally scalable data framework.”
I disagree on two counts. Firstly, in terms of the vision, the biggest problem, that of how to manage naming of things (and relationships between them) has already been solved: URIs. The existing web is a globally scalable framework, adding better data support isn’t such a big step given that.
Secondly the approach to data integration RDF offers is finding a lot of use *off* the Web (and hence a long way from the vision). The two main contracts I’m working on right now are for folks that have turned to SemWeb technologies because traditional approaches were found to be wanting for certain requirements (particularly for handling “incomplete” information, that doesn’t fit neatly into the usual RDBMS or XML paradigms). Compatibility with the Web is relatively low on their priorities.
But on the basic point, I don’t really see any problematic conflict between microformats and RDFa, they are both basically just ways of using content formats to carry explicit data (and remember microformats can quite easily be interpreted as RDF). If there is any conflict around those parts it’s between HTML and XHTML 2.0 (and HTML 5).
Ok, so I guess I’d define microcontent as small pieces of human-readable content associated with a significant amount of metatadata.
In that context, personally I can’t see myself using RDFa in the near future because of the format/content issues. In practice microformats and/or embedded RDF and/or separate content & metadata seem to cover the requirements better. That is at least until RDFa plays nicely with XHTML 1.0.
For non-(micro-)content data on the Web, i.e. stuff that isn’t intended at least in part for direct human consumption, I haven’t see any viable alternative to RDF.