It has been many years since the original idea was proposed (back in 2004) but RDFa is now a full fledged citizen of the W3C. It reached Recommendation status on 14th of Oct. The W3C uses the word recommendation, but essentially it means standard to the rest of us :)
The final hurdle has now been crossed and there is no longer any need to wait. So drop whatever you are doing and head on over to the primer. Have a quick read and then check out the wiki.
There is a lot of work yet to be done in the educational materials on RDFa. The concentration has for so long been in getting the spec in order that the examples and howtos have suffered.
I think this situation will change rapidly as there will be a lot more interest and with that comes increased traffic and hopefully more tutorials. Dries Buytaert (of Drupal fame) has just posted a wonderful road map for the Semantic Web in Drupal 7. It talks about the future of search and how quickly and painlessly any Drupal site will automatically participate.
Here is a list of some examples that should help you out:
- An example of marking up audio, music and albums
- The all important FOAF howto. Turn your home page into your Semantic Web identity quick like!
- Calendar events
- Creative Commons (CC) licensing
SearchMonkey recommends the use of these RDF vocabularies:
- dc – Dublin Core
- foaf – Friend of a Friend
- vcard
- vcal – Calendar events
- review
- sioc – Semantically Interlinked Online Communities
- gr – GoodRelations: Product price specification, delivery and payment etc.
- dbpedia – Semantic Web version of wikipedia
- fb – freebase – structured wiki with an amazing interface
Related posts:
- President Obama uses RDFa The WhiteHouse.gov site is CC licensing all its material, and...
- The New W3C Website Goes Live … With Invalid CSS! The new and overdue W3C website redesign has been completed....
- Fast Publishing of RDFa with Dreamweaver Martin McEvoy has just released the RDFa Documents extension which...
- Google Now Supports RDFa Hurray! I thought this day would never come… Google has...
- The W3C Want Your Feedback The W3C website is undergoing a long-deserved redesign and the...
So what is better Microformats or RDFa? What should use?
October 17th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Definitely exciting! I hadn’t realized RDFa was so far along the standards track, but it’s nice to see that happen. The anonymous comment above asks a good question, though. RDFa or Microformats? If I’m not mistaken, it is possible to use both, correct? Microformats relies on overloading (X)HTML class attributes and RDFa uses its own attributes, so theoretically they shouldn’t conflict with one another.
Since RDFa is the (scalable) standard I would imagine it makes more sense to start replacing microformats with them, but its microformats that currently have the more widespread implementation. So, both?
October 18th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
@Anonymous, @Meitar the RDFa community does not want to re-invent the wheel. It is pretty well accepted that microformats and RDFa can and should be used together. Current best practice is to use microformats in areas that they are good at. As soon as you need more extensibility (more vocabs, grouping, etc) use RDFa.
The real beauty of them both is that all semantic extractors convert both formats to Semantic Web triples. Essentially any site that is using microformats now is a fully participating Semantic Web citzen! This is cool. Of course RDFa offers additional power and the ability to better describe your objects.
So it is a win win situation.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
[...] který i po mnoha letech zůstal doménou teoretiků s nulovým praktickým výsledkem. Dalším je RDFa, které sice lze prakticky použít, ale vinou své komplikované syntaxe jím zůstane většina [...]
October 23rd, 2008 at 5:30 pm
[...] SitePoint Blogs » RDFa is now a W3C Recommendation There is a lot of work yet to be done in the educational materials on RDFa. The concentration has for so long been in getting the spec in order that the examples and howtos have suffered. (tags: http://www.sitepoint.com 2008 mes9 dia30 semantic_web RDFa microformats blog_post) [...]
October 31st, 2008 at 9:17 am
[...] RDFa hat nun Recommendation-Status [...]
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 pm