epgui said: “Something like an external metadata file?”
There are two ways of doing that at the moment – one is called GRDDL, which is a W3C standard that uses XSLT and can be used with HTML 4 and XHTML 1.x. It’s a bit complex though. I’m leaning more towards a non-W3C standard solution called RDF-EASE which uses a CSS-like syntax for basically overlaying metadata in the same way that a CSS file overlays styling information.
Aaron Gregg: “you mention that Yahoo! “has been processing RDFa for about a year”, but you don’t mention anything about MFs with them, are they not bothering with MFs, or have they specifically sided toward RDFa?”
Yahoo! are parsing both microformats and RDFa. Google are also parsing both microformats and RDFa, but Google’s RDFa parsing is a bit disappointing (for various long-winded reasons I won’t go into).
A few comments make comparsions between RDFa and Microformats and ask the difference. The existence of RDFa is not a reason not to publish microformats (and vice versa). You can easily interleave microformats and RDFa into one document. I’ve put up an example document at http://gist.github.com/138115 – showing hCard and RDFa mixed together. It uses a variety of exisiting RDF vocabularies in some interesting ways.
islandapart: What you seem to prefer is to wash your hands of all semantics and basically just let Google’s text-extracting sausage machine handle it all. That’s fine, except for – like capitalism, I guess – you then being completely reliant on Google’s whims for everything. If we as web developers all take semantics to hand – proper, deep semantics of what the actual objects being represented are there fore rather than just the surface semantics of “this is a header, this is the body text” etc. – we can ensure vendor neutrality and make sure that the Web can be a place for everyone to enjoy, rather than semantics being something for those with clever programmers, lots of patents and the money to buy lots and lots of computing power.
And, well, I’ve studied Aristotle (among many other philosophers) and nothing I’ve read in my day-job as a philosophy student convinces me that RDFa or microformats are bad ideas. In fact, the great philosophers have very little to say about W3C standards, semantic markup or CSS. They don’t tell me much about the Java virtual machine or whether to use Linux, Mac or Windows. To suggest they do is quite silly.
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xorock
I agree with @islandjumper. This should be the role of the machine to understand and parse documents but it is not possible yet (better, more sophisticated AI needed). I don’t like the whole MF idea – putting semantics into class attribute is messy and unnecessary. I think W3C should focus more on XHTML 2.0 and introduce some dict: namespace with global dictionaries read by all bots. But, because W3C decided to do this step back (I just read that MS don’t like HTML 5 spec and they won’t implement it) we have to wait another 10 years to make this possible.
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Discuss this article is very nice.Thanks for good article.
tommorris
epgui said: “Something like an external metadata file?”
There are two ways of doing that at the moment – one is called GRDDL, which is a W3C standard that uses XSLT and can be used with HTML 4 and XHTML 1.x. It’s a bit complex though. I’m leaning more towards a non-W3C standard solution called RDF-EASE which uses a CSS-like syntax for basically overlaying metadata in the same way that a CSS file overlays styling information.
Aaron Gregg: “you mention that Yahoo! “has been processing RDFa for about a year”, but you don’t mention anything about MFs with them, are they not bothering with MFs, or have they specifically sided toward RDFa?”
Yahoo! are parsing both microformats and RDFa. Google are also parsing both microformats and RDFa, but Google’s RDFa parsing is a bit disappointing (for various long-winded reasons I won’t go into).
A few comments make comparsions between RDFa and Microformats and ask the difference. The existence of RDFa is not a reason not to publish microformats (and vice versa). You can easily interleave microformats and RDFa into one document. I’ve put up an example document at http://gist.github.com/138115 – showing hCard and RDFa mixed together. It uses a variety of exisiting RDF vocabularies in some interesting ways.
islandapart: What you seem to prefer is to wash your hands of all semantics and basically just let Google’s text-extracting sausage machine handle it all. That’s fine, except for – like capitalism, I guess – you then being completely reliant on Google’s whims for everything. If we as web developers all take semantics to hand – proper, deep semantics of what the actual objects being represented are there fore rather than just the surface semantics of “this is a header, this is the body text” etc. – we can ensure vendor neutrality and make sure that the Web can be a place for everyone to enjoy, rather than semantics being something for those with clever programmers, lots of patents and the money to buy lots and lots of computing power.
And, well, I’ve studied Aristotle (among many other philosophers) and nothing I’ve read in my day-job as a philosophy student convinces me that RDFa or microformats are bad ideas. In fact, the great philosophers have very little to say about W3C standards, semantic markup or CSS. They don’t tell me much about the Java virtual machine or whether to use Linux, Mac or Windows. To suggest they do is quite silly.
xorock
I agree with @islandjumper. This should be the role of the machine to understand and parse documents but it is not possible yet (better, more sophisticated AI needed). I don’t like the whole MF idea – putting semantics into class attribute is messy and unnecessary. I think W3C should focus more on XHTML 2.0 and introduce some dict: namespace with global dictionaries read by all bots. But, because W3C decided to do this step back (I just read that MS don’t like HTML 5 spec and they won’t implement it) we have to wait another 10 years to make this possible.
dichev
Hi,
I translated the article into Bulgarian in my blog (http://dichev.net/bg/posts/114).
Looking forward for the next of the series.