[whatwg] RDFa Basics Video (8 minutes)

[Kristof Zelechovski]

We have two options for having both human-readable and machine-readable
information in a document: write the structure and generate the text or
write the text and recover the structure.  At the very least, if you insist
on having both, there must be a mechanism to verify that they are
consistent.
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Adida [mailto:ben at adida.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 5:28 PM
To: Kristof Zelechovski
Cc: 'Manu Sporny'; 'WHAT-WG'
Subject: Re: [whatwg] RDFa Basics Video (8 minutes)

Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
> seems to be too vulnerable and error-prone

You're basing this on your impression. The demos that we've been working
 on, and the ability with which folks are able to mark up their pages
using FOAF, shows that this isn't all that error-prone at all.

You clearly have a strong aversion to combining machine- and
human-readable data, and that is your preference.

But that combination is *exactly* what a number of us absolutely need,
because the idea of building two separate webs, one for humans and one
for programs, misses a tremendous opportunity. We need to connect what
people see on the screen (I'd like to use *this* song) with the
structured data that comes with it (license, creator, title,
description, duration, sample rate, etc...).

Almost all the time, the data we want is *already* in the HTML, just not
marked up in a way that can be machine-parsed. All we're trying to do is
add just enough markup to have it be parsed, generically, by browsers
and search crawlers.

-Ben