Grauw’s blog

[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for. Hixie’s proposal for microdata, a simplified RDFa to be included in the HTML5 spec which allows self-contained communities to invent their own microformat-style spec and use it to add structured semantics to their markup.

Looks like the HTML5 editor suffers from the NIH syndrome. Although you’d say that for a W3C working group, ‘here’ would still include a different W3C group that is chartered to do this work.

Either way, it’s nice that it adopts the RDFa syntax, but the move from RDF to a new HTML-only Java-style ‘namespacing’ is just terribly pointless. Not to mention that it alienates the entire RDF community and disregards all the effort put in bringing RDF technologies to maturity. Did I mention it was pointless?

But I guess it was to be expected, given Hixie’s allergy for basically everything that ever came out of the W3C. Also nice that his proposal appears right in the specification working draft, as usual, bringing with it the impression that it is now here and being forced upon us.

He almost succeeded in shaking off Shelley, but fortunately it looks like she decided to keep pressing the issue. Let’s hope there are still enough RDFa proponents left that are willing to put the effort in stopping this train.