[whatwg] Self-imposed RDFa cool-down period

[Manu Sporny]

This will be the last post about RDFa that both Ben and I will be making
for at least the next couple of weeks. The conversation started in this
community regarding Creative Common's decision to use RDFa to not only
express licensing concerns, but other important metadata surrounding
creative works.

There are a number of us that were pulled into the discussion by members
in this community and it is unfortunate that our explanations of the
semantic data expression requirements have been understood as "beat(ing)
everyone over the head"[1]. That was not our intention and we have
endeavored to keep our argumentation logical and civil.

We are instituting a self-imposed cool-down period regarding RDFa. The
threads are getting very long at this point and the discussion seems to
be, against our best intentions, annoying some of the people on this
mailing list[1].

The goal of these threads was always to educate the HTML5 community
about the requirements of semantic data expression in HTML[2] and the
possibilities of semantics expression using RDFa. I believe that there
has been enough discussion to see that goal realized among those that
have kept an open mind to the idea of semantics expression in HTML. We
invite those of you that are interested in HTML5+RDFa (in any form) to
continue the discussion on the public-rdfa at w3.org[3] mailing list.

The RDFa Task Force has two to three more months of W3C process to go
through before RDFa becomes an official standard. We must focus our
effort on seeing that through first. After RDFa is a W3C standard, we
will create a request to integrate it into HTML5 and discuss the matter
in an official capacity with the WHATWG community at that time.

We'd like to thank those that have read these threads and contributed to
the discussion for taking the time to do so. While we may not agree on
the methods of making the Web a better place, it is evident that all of
us care deeply about that shared goal.

-- manu

[1]http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/016135.html
[2]http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015957.html
[3]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.0 Website Launches
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/07/03/bitmunk-3-website-launches