[whatwg] RDFa Problem Statement

[Dan Brickley]

Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
> Ben Adida wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> It does just this today, from actual RDFa. I've been working on an 
> extension that integrates RDFa from the matched pages with additional 
> information from external DataRSS (Atom+OpenSearch+RDFa) feeds.

A bit more information from Peter Mika at Yahoo (fwd'd with permission):
[[
the key point... is that indeed DataRSS is both Atom and RDFa 
compatible. RDFa is a set of attributes, we merely invented names for 
the XML elements that carry them... but you can completely ignore that 
and get the triples out by running an RDFa parser over it. OpenSearch is 
another extension you can add in the mix if you want.

We turn both microformats and RDFa-in-HTML into DataRSS when used as 
input for applications so that SearchMonkey applications can abstract 
away from the original format.

We are definitely not Microsoft doing JavaScript, since we are extending 
formats in the way they were foreseen (Atom extensibility) and complying 
with standards (RDFa) without adding to them or changing the meaning of 
constructs. So this is a genuine Semantic Web standards play.

Btw, we haven't announced RDFa support officially because we want to get 
it 100% right before we do... ok maybe 99% ;)
]]

cheers,

Dan

ps. http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/ is a nice case 
for in-page structured data, whether microformatty/posh or rdfa