Comments on: Add Semantic Richness To Your Markup With (RDF) Ease

By: Meitar

Meitar — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:37:26 +0000

I'm glad you found this interesting, raena. I sure did! I think there are definite pros and cons for each argument here, and it will be interesting to watch and see how this might develop towards implementations in the future.

By: raena

raena — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:25:22 +0000

This is super nifty! I’ve been wanting to make more RDFa happen on my blog but not really got around to it yet, because there’s a lot of time involved. There’d be quite a lot less time if I could use it like this.

I think this is a really positive step towards more adoption of RDFa.

Again, the potential issue I see comes in the form of the explicit separation of the semantics of content from the content itself. The beautiful thing about microformats and RDFa is that they’re right where your content is, so both humans and machines can get what they need from the markup in the same file. This reduces the complexity (and therefore the cost) of CMS programs and other software, and—I argue—the potential for human (developer) error.

That’s true, but equally it also reduces the complexity of the markup, and it gives you the opportunity to change things down the track—just like if you wanted to change your design on your site by altering a single CSS file. If I started out not using Dublin Core for whatever reason, and six months down the track decided that this was probably a good idea after all, I can just pop it straight in the EASE file.

Further, since your choices would be linked up with other ontologies, suddenly your tools would interact with you in ways that were more meaningful for you, without needing the developer’s prior awareness or blessing for you to do this.

That’s an excellent thing.

Cool post Meitar!

By: Meitar

Meitar — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:57:43 +0000

@karl: Oh, wow, I never came across COW but you're right, it looks incredibly similar. Thanks for the pointer! After a cursory glance at the specification document you linked, I think one of the main differences is that RDF-EASE has built heavily on RDFa. Of course, COW seems to be old—older than RDFa, even. It's interesting to note that this idea is not all that new, after all. That could mean it's doomed to fail or just ahead of its time. Only time will tell. ;)

By: karl

karl — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:03:51 +0000

(oops missed the link)

It looks very similar in the idea to cow which was an attempt at creating a semantic structure with a very simple syntax but outside of the document.

* Good. easy to understand. easy to adapt for a large number of pages.
* Bad. metadata/far not being local, then risk of discrepancy when updating the pages.

Note that local metadata have also their own set of issues. :)

By: karl

karl — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:03:03 +0000

It looks very similar in the idea to which was an attempt at creating a semantic structure with a very simple syntax but outside of the document.

* Good. easy to understand. easy to adapt for a large number of pages.
* Bad. metadata/far not being local, then risk of discrepancy when updating the pages.

Note that local metadata have also their own set of issues. :)