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

[Ben Adida]

Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> However, Ian has a point in his first paragraph.  SearchMonkey does
> *not* do auto-discovery; it relies entirely on site owners telling it
> precisely what data to extract, where it's allowed to extract it from,
> and how to present it.

That's incorrect.

You can build a SearchMonkey infobar that is set to function on all URLs
(just use "*" in your URL field.)

For example, the Creative Commons SearchMonkey application:

http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=kVf.s

(currently broken because of a recent change in the SearchMonkey PHP API
that we need to address, so here's a photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ysearchblog/2869419185/
)

By adding the CC RDFa markup to your page, it will show up with the
infobar in Yahoo searches.

So site-specific microformats are clearly less powerful. And
vocabulary-specific microformats, while useful, are also not as useful
here (consider a SearchMonkey application that picks up CC-licensed
items, be they video, audio, books, scientific data, etc... Different
microformats = development hell.)

Have you read the RDFa Primer?
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/

It describes (pre-SearchMonkey) the kind of applications that can be
built with RDFa. SearchMonkey is an ideal example, but it's by no means
the only one.

-Ben