[whatwg] RDFa Problem Statement

Ben Adida ben at adida.net
Tue Aug 26 11:53:03 PDT 2008


Greg Houston wrote:
> I am not sure if Ben was eluding to this in the last paragraph, but to
> further complicate things SearchMonkey is not actually using RDF,

I think you're confusing two different layers.

SearchMonkey parses HTML with microformats, and soon HTML+RDFa, and
makes that data available in RDF form to PHP scripts that you or anyone
else can write.

DataRSS is an intermediate representation that Yahoo provides so that,
if you want to specifically code your app to SearchMonkey, you can
directly produce DataRSS, which is only machine readable. But if you
want to produce the interoperable syntax that isn't Yahoo-specific and
that is both human and machine-readable, RDFa is your path.

(What may make things even more confusing is that DataRSS is itself
inspired by RDFa... but that's a different discussion altogether.)

Here's Yahoo discussing their support for RDFa parsing:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000527.html

-Ben





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