[whatwg] RDFa is to structured data, like canvas is to bitmap and SVG is to vector

[Dan Brickley]

On 17/1/09 19:27, Sam Ruby wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Shelley Powers
> <shelleyp at burningbird.net>  wrote:
>> The debate about RDFa highlights a disconnect in the decision making related
>> to HTML5.
>
> Perhaps.  Or perhaps not.  I am far from an apologist for Hixie, (nor
> for that matter and I a strong advocate for RDF), but I offer the
> following question and observation.
>
>> The purpose behind RDFa is to provide a way to embed complex information
>> into a web document, in such a way that a machine can extract this
>> information and combine it with other data extracted from other web pages.
>> It is not a way to document private data, or data that is meant to be used
>> by some JavaScript-based application. The sole purpose of the data is for
>> external extraction and combination.
>
> So, I take it that it isn't essential that RDFa information be
> included in the DOM?  This is not rhetorical: I honestly don't know
> the answer to this question.

Good question. I for one expect RDFa to be accessible to Javascript.

http://code.google.com/p/rdfquery/wiki/Introduction -> 
http://rdfquery.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/markup/markup.html is a 
nice example of code that does something useful in this way.

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/