This document was successfully checked as XHTML + RDFa!
Monday 16 February 2009 ◷ 13:33
XHTML + RDFa? What does that mean? It means I can tell anyone whose site is only valid XHTML strict (in their dreams) they are soooo 2007.
In theory it makes this site part of the semantic web by providing some meta data in a way that can be automatically handled by systems designed to handle them. The part I did understand was that I'm now able to put attributes in my HTML that say how that part of the page is licensed. So as soon as I've tracked down all the licenses of all the icons on this page I can add RDF attributes to the img tags that say they are not mine but licensed in some way. It's also possible to wrap comments into RDF enabled tags so that the comments on a blog are owned and licensed different from the posts. The license part kind of makes sense if everything on the web was obviously licensed in the first place, but then there is also the FOAF part, which fails to make sense, for about 7 years already.
I don't believe in semantics that live outside an organization that aims to conform to those semantics. Real life is way to fuzzy and to much of a work in progress to try to think about the semantics involved. Web 2.0 means I'm not just telling readers how stuff is, I'm having a conversation with an audience and during that conversation semantics are volatile, and that conversation never ends. Volatile semantics allow creativity, and the semantic web is for boring people who are delighted to be able fit into a description provided by a W3C recommendation. And most of the time I'm stunned by the irony of how utterly unreadable those documents explaining semantic concepts are:
GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. It is a technique for obtaining RDF data from XML documents and in particular XHTML pages. Authors may explicitly associate documents with transformation algorithms, typically represented in XSLT, using a link element in the head of the document. Alternatively, the information needed to obtain the transformation may be held in an associated metadata profile document or namespace document. Clients reading the document can follow links across the Web using techniques described in the GRDDL specification to discover the appropriate transformations. This document uses a number of examples from the GRDDL Use Cases document to illustrate, in detail, the techniques GRDDL provides for associating documents with appropriate instructions for extracting any embedded data. GRDDL PrimerAnd then they wonder why nobody fucking cares about GRDDL? With a '30s communist style logo instead of a shiny Web 2.0 one?