Clarification: RDF the Syntax Will Not Be Successful

Danny is spot on with his thoughts on Steampunk Semantics in response to my earlier Is Usefulness Inversely Proportional to Specificity? post.

Also, he's very right I conflated a few issues. To that I owe my 2 month old, who requires my Just In Time attention, and thus has me context switching faster than a single core CPU running a Java application.

I'd like to clarify and say that I feel that RDF the Syntax will fail. It's not able to embedded into XHTML in a way that anyone knows about or cares about. Microformats have succeeded here, allowing me to *very easily* embed metadata into XHTML.

Can I generate the same graph of metadata with microformat serialization or RDF serialization? I believe I generally can (though some research here should prove this). And this fact that RDF is also a data model might well be its saving grace.

"But what if I'm not publishing XHTML? How do microformats help me publish metadata?" you say? To which I answer: "Use NTriples, Turtle, or even N3". They are more widely used among humans than RDF/XML is these days, and are a de facto standard and option in the exchange of triples.

"But I love XML! I want RDF/XML!" you cry! To which I reply, Good luck trying to use RDF/XML serialization with your favorite XML tools. XSLT? Forget it. XQuery? Not on your life.

Let's take what's good about RDF (the triples, the simple graph model), toss what's not working (the XML serialization, forcing the use of URIs), and publish how to represent microformats in the RDF data model.

Let RDF ride on microformats. Let microformats play in RDF world.

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