[whatwg] Ghosts from the past and the semantic Web

[Ben Adida]

I'm going to keep my answer somewhat brief because Manu and I have
privately discussed wrapping up this thread so we don't take up too much
of people's time. I'll focus on simple points.

> (Note: I've been discussing just such a CSS-like rdf format with Ben
> offlist, inspired directly by Eduard's proposal earlier.)

I think this idea is interesting, but I don't think it can be made to
work until we get the basic RDFa stuff actually working inline.

The comparison to CSS is not quite right: with this new proposal, you
have to first map your HTML to local semantic concepts, then map those
local concepts to global semantic concepts. That's quite a bit more
complicated for the average user, and it's not the same at all as the
separation of presentation that is the huge CSS win.

There is some benefit for folks who are presenting a lot of content in a
consistent way.... in other words folks who already have some kind of
templating engine and who can easily do RDFa in the first place.

For folks who have ad-hoc HTML, this is more complicated.

So, like I said, interesting, but I think only a small benefit for large
publishers, and a significant downside for small publishers. All in all,
for Creative Commons, for example, this is not as good.

-Ben