[whatwg] Trying to work out the problems solved by RDFa

[Giovanni Campagna]

I've tried to follow all the discussion besides of its lengths and my
conclusion is:
You're asking the wrong question

People against RDFa in HTML5 are asking "why do you need RDFa?", and
supporters of the proposal are actually describing the benefits of RDFa
itself.

The right question is: why do you need RDFa *inside HTML5*?

My personal answer to this question is:
There is no needing for RDFa inside HTML5. There are other markup languages
which support RDFa natively (XHTML for example).
You may say that in this way you help to divide the web in two sides, users
of HTML5 and users of XHTML2.

Actually the web, is already divided in two big groups:
- Web of data
- Web of interaction

Web of data means all the page whose primary objective is to provide some
information, either user-readable or machine-readable to the users, while
web of interaction include web application, whose primary purpose is to
provide additional services to the users.
These two groups have very different requirements (GMail doesn't need RDFa
in application code, while Wikipedia doesn't need a progress element), so
specific markup languages may suit better the web site.
Moreover, this distinction is not a requirement, is just an advice: you can
put metadata inside HTML5 using Microformats and you can put interactivity
inside XHTML2 using XMLEvents.

Summing up: if you author feel the absolute needing for metadata, because
delivering content to the users is your primary goal, then switch from HTML5
to something else, and leave HTML5 to web application, focused on user
interaction.

Giovanni
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