I think it’s great the idea of including semantic markup in XHTML pages is gaining traction due to that fact that Google has announced support for Microformats and RDFa.
What is semantic markup?
Semantic markup means developers use html elements to give content meaning, or context to computers. For example if we use the word “Paris” in our content we can tell the computer (through markup) that we mean “Paris” is a place in France or “Paris” is referring to Paris Hilton the person.
What is the difference between RDFa and Microformats?
1. Different Histories
Microformats.org has grown out of the work of Technorati’s developer community, whereas RDFa has grown as a concept from the W3 Semantic Web group.
2. Different Markup
Joy. Yet another standards clash.
Microformats uses the “class” attribute to provide meaning e.g. class=”locality”.
Whereas, W3C uses new attributes such as “property” to provide meaning e.g. property=”dc:location”.
(Where “dc:” references the set of vocabulary that is being used, in this case “dc” stands for Dublin Core Metadata namespace, but this could be any namespace you define.)
Where’s the future heading?
There’s an obvious clash between these two methods of creating semantic markup – more people are currently using Microformats (which is also recognised by a number of browsers), but RDFa has been developed by the W3C and uses XML namespaces it provides a scalable format for semantic content.
As XHTML 2 standards begin to be more widely used, hopefully more developers will begin using RDFa for microformats markup (this is an interesting debate).
Otherwise this may mean we will be coding for different browsers and coding for the integration of different formats.
Further reading
- RDFa vs Microformats
- Introduction to RDFa
- Getting Semantic with Microformats
- W3C xhtml RDFa Primer
- Microformats.org
- A Comparison of Microformats, eRDF, and RDFa (Thanks to Michael)
Comments
What are your thoughts? RDFa or Microformats?
… an additional bullet point for your further reading:
http://bnode.org/blog/2007/02/12/comparison-of-microformats-erdf-and-rdfa
Cheers,
Michael
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I have been reading about this all night trying to decide which one to use. To me Micoroformats seem a lot easier to use. When I first started looking at it it was much more intuitive for me to use that one, at least as it relates to basic things. But it seems that as it evolves over time that RDFa will have more flexibility and be adopted more widely. Still as a development company it is our intent to support both until there is a different option. Both meaning one or the other on a particular site, not both at the same time on the same site hopefully.
As James said above microformats seem easier. But it’s not like RDFa is hard to implement either. I like the fact that RDFa is extensible and more importantly searchable by SPARQL.
According to Berners Lee it is this (last mentioned feature) which would enable meaning to be transformed to linked data and web 3.0.
(or maybe i got that wrong )
Thanks a lot. That was a great post. Definitly it helped me to understand the differents between both.
In my opinion now both are value. Microformats are easier but just are an aproximation to semantic web. I’ll bet to RDFa on my web sites