Seth Ladd's Blog

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: "U...

Thinking about microformats and RDF, I'm wondering how microformats might succeed where RDF hasn't. To be clear, success to me is determined by penetration of the metadata format into run of the mill XHTML, and the ease at which someone can inject the metadata right into the XHTML document. In other words, success is awarded to the metadata format that has the lowest barrier of entry. Will microformats succeed because they can and are so vague? Is RDF asking people to be too specific? Is the usefulness of a metadata markup format for the web inversely proportional to the specificity of the metadata itself? Case in point. Go ahead and try to define what foaf#knows means. It certainly means something different from one person to another. The specification itself opens itself up to interpretation. > knows - A person known by this person (indicating some level of reciprocated interaction between the parties). and > We take a broad view of 'knows' This vaguenes...

It's a relief to hear that Mozilla will add direct support for Microformats into Firefox 3 . Through Microformats , you can quite easily markup your XHTML with extra semantics. You can, for example, declare that a particular set of XHTML elements contains a person's address. Of course, by reading the web page, you'd be able to easily determine if that page contains an address. But can your browser? With direct support for Microformats, it will. Once your browser understands that an address is present on the web page, you'll be able to easily add it to your address book of choice. Ah, the dream within a dream. This is data aware browsing, people. If you want Web 2.0 to mean anything other than marketing hype, this is what needs to happen. Want to try this type of data integration out right now? Give Operator a shot. It extends Firefox 2 to be microformat aware, allowing you to do _actually useful things with microformats_.