[whatwg] Creative Commons Rights Expression Language

[Ben Adida]

Ian Hickson wrote:
>> Clearly, and as the voice-over states, the site needs embedded metadata 
>> that easily connects "what the user is pointing to" to the structured 
>> data required for mapping.
> 
> Since Craigslist doesn't have structured data now, that seems like a 
> verifiably false claim. :-)

Did you listen to the video? It clearly states that they wrote a
specific hack for Craigslist, but that they expect this to work more
generically. Site-specific hacks don't scale to the Web. A solution that
scales will require a single parser, not site-specific parsers (though
site-specific parsers will likely be a transition path.)

The video's comments about microformats should make that clear.

> In fact, Craigslist is a great example. Given how hostile Craigslist has 
> been to people reusing their data,

You're confusing two issues. Craigslist doesn't want other *web sites*
redistributing their data. I doubt they would take issue with users
trying to process the data for their own private needs.

Craigslist mostly relies on its "no bots" Terms of Use to prevent other
sites from reusing their data. They certainly don't make it too
difficult to screen-scrape, given their simple templates.

> what reason do we have to believe that they would ever make their data 
> accessible using RDFa? (Or any other metadata system in fact.)

So, assuming you're right about Craigslist (and I think you're wrong, as
mentioned above), in your opinion, there won't be a reasonable number of
publishers who want to publish RDFa (or something like it?) Everyone
will just obscure their data so it's only human readable?

That's a rather limited view of the potential of the web. Do you not see
the value that's unleashed by tools like Ubiquity, and the incentive
that web sites will have to plug in?

-Ben