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:

And then they won­der why no­body fuck­ing cares about GRDDL? With a '30s com­mu­nist style logo in­stead of a shiny Web 2.0 one?