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The HTML5 DOM and RDFa

Thu, 2009-09-24 08:05 — Jeni

One of the fundamental disconnects between HTML5 and previous versions of HTML is the way in which you answer the question “what is the structure of this page?”. Things that make use of that structure, such as RDFa, need to take this into account.

An example is the document:

<html>
  <head><title>HTML example</title></head>
  <body>
    <table>
      <span>Example title</span>
      <tr><td>Example table</td></tr>
    </table>
  </body>
</html>

HTML5/RDFa Arguments

Fri, 2009-08-21 18:28 — Jeni

When I came back from holiday, I caught up with the recent discussions around RDFa and HTML5. It’s exhausting reading so many posts repetitively reiterating the positions of people who all have the best of intentions but fundamentally different priorities. And such a shame that so much energy is spent on fruitless discussion when it could be spent at the very least improving specifications, if not testing, implementing, experimenting or otherwise in some very minor way changing the world.

Google's RDFa Support

Wed, 2009-05-13 21:30 — Jeni

I can’t reply to Henri Sivonen

@JeniT What’s wrong with http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/rdf.xml ?

in 140 characters.

http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/rdf.xml is the the RDF schema that describes the classes and properties recognised by Google’s rich snippets, which promises to provide richer information about search results than is available currently, in the manner of SearchMonkey.

So what’s so bad about this RDF schema?

What You Can't Do with HTML5 Microdata

Wed, 2009-05-13 00:57 — Jeni

Update: Fixed a couple of errors in the microdata code.

The HTML5 microdata proposal has hit the web, just days before Google announced its support for RDFa (or at least one vocabulary encoded using RDFa attributes). These are, indeed, “interesting times” for the semantic web.

Now, if you’re one of those weirdos who want to embed RDF triples within your web pages, what you’re going to care about is whether you can use microdata to do it. Those of us who have been using RDFa in anger, rather than in toy examples, know that it can be hard to map a particular set of RDF statements onto HTML content. I thought I’d take a look to see just what it would be like to create particular RDF with the HTML5 microdata proposal.

Evolving Standards

Sun, 2009-05-10 20:36 — Jeni

I’ve been trying to finalise this post for a long time now, but today’s publication of an HTML5 draft that includes a new microdata section makes it all the more relevant. The long and short of it is that I am less and less concerned about the huge mess that is the HTML5 standardisation process. On the one hand, it’s a huge mess; on the other, it doesn’t matter.

Temporal Scope for RDF Triples

Sun, 2009-02-15 17:23 — Jeni

To me, the biggest deficiency in RDF is how hard it is to associate metadata with statements. I’ve talked before about the requirement in the genealogical application I’m toying with to provide metadata such as who made a statement, when, based on which source, the certainty in it and so on. But there’s one type of metadata that I think is required in practically every domain: the temporal scoping of statements.

Your Website is Your API: Quick Wins for Government Data

Sun, 2009-02-01 09:28 — Jeni

This is the talk I prepared for the UKGovWeb Barcamp, in blog form. It’s probably better this way. Most of what’s written here seems blindingly obvious to me, and probably to most readers of this blog, but maybe Google will direct someone here who finds it useful.

Working with public-sector information on the web, one of the things that I take an interest in is making government data freely available for anyone to re-present, mash-up, analyse and generally do whatever they want to do. This post is born out of a feeling that the people who control data don’t realise that the smallest changes can be beneficial: they don’t need to do everything right now, just something.

rdfQuery: Progressive Enhancement with RDFa

Sat, 2008-11-15 16:46 — Jeni

Earlier this week I presented at SWIG-UK about rdfQuery. rdfQuery is a set of plugins that I’ve developed for jQuery in order to support RDFa parsing, querying and generation. There are a bunch of other Javascript libraries for RDFa around, such as Mark Birbeck’s Ubiquity RDFa and Ben Adida’s RDFa library. What I’ve really tried to do with rdfQuery is tie it in with the “Write Less, Do More” philosophy of jQuery and provide a neat, elegant API. At least that’s the aim!

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