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

[Kornel Lesiński]

On 09.01.2009, at 01:54, Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote:
>
> This is why I was thinking about somewhat "data-rdfa-about", "data- 
> rdfa-property", "data-rdfa-content" and so on, so that, for the  
> purposes of an RDFa processor working on top of HTML5 UAs

One can also use <link rel="alternate" href="description.rdf">. I  
don't see why RDF metadata must be in the HTML document. It could be  
in a separated file, maybe embedded in RSS/Atom feeds (RSS1.0 is  
pretty close already).

Websites that have a lot of useful data to share usually keep it in a  
database, and this allows them to easily generate RDF as separate  
documents without risk of getting out of sync with the HTML version.

IMHO even RDFa metadata is invisible, and errors in RDFa wouldn't be  
much easier to spot than erorrs in external RDF files, e.g.:

<section typeof="atom:Entry" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/1.0/"
xmlns:atom="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">
  <address rel="atom:author">
    On <time property="atom:published" content="2009-01-10"
     >10 Jan 2009</time>,
    <a property="foaf:name" rel="foaf:page"
    href="http://joe.example.com">Joe Bloggs</a> wrote:
  </address>

-- 
regards, Kornel