Comments on: RDFa as an RDF serialization syntax

By: Julian Everett

Julian Everett — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:49:50 +0000

In response to your “so what?” Ivan, I would argue that there is a separation of concerns problem with RDFa used this way. It mixes human-readable and machine-readable representations into one overly generic bundle. For example, what would be the MIME type of such a serialisation format? I guess application/xhtml+xml would be the most likely candidate, but that signifies nothing to clients about the richer semantics actually embedded in the doc. Surely separate human-readable (i.e. application/xhtml+xml non-overloaded XHTML) and machine-readable (i.e. application/rdf+xml) representations of the same resource would be a much cleaner and also more web-friendly approach?

Julian

By: Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:24:28 +0000

On long term, various RDF consumers (databases, SPARQL endpoints, etc) would consume those files just as easily as they do GRDDL profile-d files. (I agree that adding the RDFa profiles to pages, though not required, is helpful in this respect).

By the way, setting up Apache to get to the RDF content of such files automatically is also possible, see my earlier blog: http://ivanherman.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/setting-up-and-rdfa-file-with-apache-second/. Yes, it requires some access to apache, but then the choice between the HTML or the RDF content is a matter of content negotiation that all RDF consumers, afaik, do already…

By: Daniel O'Connor

Daniel O'Connor — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:03:10 +0000

So what? What about consumers that don’t grok RDFa? That page doesn’t have a profile which is GRDDL friendly, so that is even more lost possible means to get out RDF.