[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for

[Shelley Powers]

James Graham wrote:
> jgraham at opera.com wrote:
>> Quoting Philip Taylor <excors+whatwg at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> One of the more elaborate use cases I collected from the e-mails 
>>>> sent in
>>>> over the past few months was the following:
>>>>
>>>>   USE CASE: Annotate structured data that HTML has no semantics 
>>>> for, and
>>>>   which nobody has annotated before, and may never again, for 
>>>> private use or
>>>>   use in a small self-contained community.
>>>>
>>>> [...]
>>>>
>>>> To address this use case and its scenarios, I've added to HTML5 a 
>>>> simple
>>>> syntax (three new attributes) based on RDFa.
>>>
>>> There's a quickly-hacked-together demo at
>>> http://philip.html5.org/demos/microdata/demo.html (works in at least
>>> Firefox and Opera), which attempts to show you the JSON serialisation
>>> of the embedded data, which might help in examining the proposal.
>>
>> I have a *totally unfinished* demo that does something rather similar
>> at [1]. It is highly likely to break and/or give incorrect results**.
>> If you use it for anything important you are insane :)
>
> I have now added extremely preliminary RDF support with output as N3 
> and  RDF/XML courtesy of rdflib. It is certain to be buggy.
>
So much concern about generating RDF, makes one wonder why we didn't 
just implement RDFa...

Shelley