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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 2, 2009, at 14:01, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:

> On 2/1/09 10:38, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> More to the point, Microformats not only require per-format  
>> processing
>> but the processing required for each Microformat isn't specified at  
>> all.
>> That's bad.
>
> Some do have processing specified (at least to some degree):
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing

That's still not a proper parsing spec. Do all microformat consumers  
with significant market share do it that way?

> For the rest, this seems like something fixable, so I'm not sure how  
> this is more to the point?

HTML parsing is fixable, too, but actually fixing it is something that  
didn't happen until the fixing effort was taken to the spec level.

> * http://microformats.org/wiki/parsing-brainstorming (attempt to  
> actually specify precise parsing rules for all microformats)

This one I hadn't seen before. It's clearly a step into a more spec- 
like direction.

> It could of course be the RDFa curie is worse than the disease.

I suspect that is the case.

>> Is the problem in the case of recipes that the provider of the page
>> navigation around the recipe is unwilling to license the navigation  
>> bits
>> under the same license as the content proper?
>
> I thought Toby's example was that each recipe on the page needed a  
> different licence, rather than a distinction between the main  
> content area and the navigation.

Oh. That can be solved by giving each recipe its own URI & HTML page  
and scraping those pages instead of summary pages that might contain  
multiple recipes.

>> In the case of images, why should a program inferring something about
>> licensing trust assertions made in a different HTTP resource  
>> (possibly
>> even from a different Origin)?
>
> Why should it trust assertions made in the same resource?
>
> For example, presumably you could download an image, change its  
> licencing metadata, and host it at your own Origin? Admittedly,  
> that's a little more work than just hotlinking.

Good point. That's a problem if you are examining a previously unknown  
and untrusted site that might have all its content copied from  
somewhere else. Trusting the origin of the data for it licensing does  
help, though, if you are browsing a site you believe to be reputable  
and clueful and want to automate the license discovery part only.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/