[uf-discuss] Potential for Microformats.org to work with W3C and RDFa Task Force

Thu Aug 28 14:55:04 PDT 2008

On 28 Aug 2008, at 12:24, Manu Sporny wrote:
> It will take a couple of weeks to give examples of how this will all
> work, but I wanted to get feedback from this community before
> proceeding. We have a fantastic opportunity in front of us now - who 
> in
> this community thinks that we should work with the W3C on this 
> endeavor?

I'm not sure I completely see the benefit in this, and seeing your 
examples would be very helpful in getting a better idea of what you're 
proposing. From your bullet points, it seems to suggest taking 
microformat vocabularies and expressing them in RDFa, rather than 
HTML? It seems redundant for publishers.
However, I do have a somewhat related issue that you might consider 
part of this effort. Some discussions I've had lately revealed 
usefulness in being able to _map_ microformats into RDF, for the 
purpose of combining microformats with other RDF vocabularies in a 
back-end somewhere (so, conversion for processing, rather than 
publishing. Publishing remains in HTML where it is most effective).
I'm told that RDF ‘versions’ of vcard and icalendar are out of date 
compared to the microformats. As such, it strikes me that rather than 
maintaining duplicate specifications, it would instead make sense to 
develop a set of standard transformations so that any microformat can 
be transformed from HTML to RDF, without requiring duplicate effort to 
maintain another spec. This I'm sure would relate closely to GRDDL, 
since that already deals with transformation.
This latter issue seems valuable, and preferable to a situation where 
every processor of microformats and RDF comes up with their own 
incompatible conversions.
Note, I'm talking about mapping rules, not separate specs. For 
example, we have the ‘jCard’ page on the wiki, which I still feel 
should be more generic ‘JSON Mapping Rules’ page that can cover 
parsing from any format, not just hcard. If this RDF mapping effort is 
pursued by anyone, I would again favour ‘RDF Mapping Rules’, rather 
than ‘rCard’, ‘rCal’ and ‘rListing’ — duplicate specs not based in 
HTML are not something that this community was founded to produce.
Cheers,
Ben