Schema.org — Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Agree On Markup Vocabulary 192
aabelro writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages' content."
Manu Sporny, chair of the W3C group that created RDFa, added his (personal) dissenting opinion about Schema, calling it a 'false choice,' and saying, "The entire Web community should decide which features should be supported – not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo."
Not to worry... (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft will break this one, too.
Re:Not to worry... (Score:5, Insightful)
The proposal is itself breaking html. This time, Google and Yahoo are in with the "extending". The vague promise of better search positions will drive web developers to completely muck up their html output. There is no reason not to re-use the Dublin Core [wikipedia.org].
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So they're breaking HTML by following the HTML5 specification [w3.org]?
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Microdata is not part of the HTML5 specification. Right at the top of your linked document it says:
Status: Controversial Working Draft. ISSUE-76 (Microdata/RDFa) blocks progress to Last Call
and then if you click on the issue link, you see:
There will be a forthcoming HTML5+RDFa proposal that may either be published along-side the Microdata specification or in place of the Microdata specification. RDFa is a alternate technology that is currently published as a Recommendation via the W3C . An additional alternative that is being proposed is the removal of Microdata and RDFa from the HTML5 specification and the placement of each section into a separate specification that is implemented on top of the HTML5 standard.
In addition, the charter for the HTML WG mentions:
"The HTML WG is encouraged to provide a mechanism to permit independently developed vocabularies such as Internationalization Tag Set (ITS), Ruby, and RDFa to be mixed into HTML documents. Whether this occurs through the extensibility mechanism of XML, whether it is also allowed in the classic HTML serialization, and whether it uses the DTD and Schema modularization techniques, is for the HTML WG to determine."
The current microdata section precludes this Charter requirement.
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It's interesting that Google come up with this alternative when one of their own staff is the editor for the Microdata specification.
If you mean the subject of TFS, then it's not an alternative - it uses Microdata.
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Er, yes it is. You might not like it, but it specifies something. Albeit poorly in some areas.
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To be fair, whatwg's "HTML is a living standard" bullshit was the first successful attempt at breaking HTML, and is in essence the exact same thing that these companies are proposing. So, it appears that everyone is trying to break up HTML to their own benefit.
Re:Not to worry... (Score:4, Insightful)
The latter implies the former. I say go right back to XHTML 1.0 Strict (the last standard that didn't have a broken DTD) and concentrate on finally getting all the browsers to better implement SGML [w3.org]. For example, all of the itemprop, itemscope, and itemtype crap [schema.org] could be done better with processing instructions [wikipedia.org] (say, pop an <?itemscope ?> tag thing and poof, done), without fucking up the markup. schema.org is trying (among other things, I guess) to help search engines better understand the page,* and PIs were made to tell applications how to process data, so it's a matter of getting them to play The Dating Game and meet.
Stop making HTML harder to validate and process, and start making browsers better conform--and developers more completely use--the many existing features in it and its underlying SGML or XML. That's Allstat^Wgame kid's stand.
*"However, the HTML tag doesn't give any information about what that text string means—"Avatar" could refer to the a hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user."
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HTML 5 is a shining beacon of brilliance compared to some recent "standards" out there... Medica[re|id]'s "Meaningful Use" currently has me considering a lucrative career as an Amway salesman...
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Congrats.
I'm still trying to get my team through the twisty maze of requirements, all conflicting.
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Stop making HTML harder to validate and process, and start making browsers better conform--and developers more completely use--the many existing features in it and its underlying SGML or XML.
This has been the lament of markup nerds (I was one once, but I got better) since 1995, which tells us that it isn't going to happen. There has never been any incentive for companies to be validation-centric, because users aren't capable of creating validating code. Neither are tool-vendors.
This has been the strength of HTML as a "standard": it's a consultant. You ask it to do something, it'll go ahead and do it, regardless of whether what you're asking for makes any sense.
And because the consumers of H
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Sorry, been there, done that, didn't work.
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Ahhh Slashdot, where bashing Microsoft for no good reason is always a good way to get modded up.
It's not that we have no reason to do so; it's that there are so many that we get tired of reciting them. 8^)
This time, the development is newsworthy because we also get to beat up on Google and Yahoo! at the same time. The reasons may be found in the article, which, despite its angry, polemical tone, is pretty much on the money.
Google, Microsoft et alia are basically saying, 'Speak my language on the web - win a prize!' That's all well and good, right up until you want to encapsulate your data in such a wa
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You can't provide citations on future events. You can only go on past behaviour.
As the magic eight ball says: Outlook not so good.
not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo. (Score:3)
Right. You've got to include Facebook.
How is this different than the MetaData tag? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know about this specific format, but for example e-commerce companies have been annotating their pages with semantic tags. Best Buy, for example, has annotated a huge amount of data with the Good Relations ontology.
And I don't really see how could this be abused, except for the boost that Google gives to any semantically tagged pages - but that effect should wear off as most sites implement them too.
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The problem with the concept of a semantic lies at the feet of human nature.
The people who would benefit the most are not those th
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Re:How is this different than the MetaData tag? (Score:4, Informative)
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Sure, but if that became a problem then I'd imagine that a) It would show up to the user whenever Google, Bing or Yahoo presented a "RIch search result" from a page trying to game the system, and b) The search engines could look at the size of the text by analyzing the markup, and demote pages with a whole bunch of these tags surrounding really tiny text - bonus marks for detecting low contrast or unreadable text by analyzing the markup.
There is also no suggestion that this markup will be the primary factor
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Sure, but if that became a problem then I'd imagine that a) It would show up to the user whenever Google, Bing or Yahoo presented a "RIch search result" from a page trying to game the system,
Not if it isn't near the top of the page.
and b) The search engines could look at the size of the text by analyzing the markup, and demote pages with a whole bunch of these tags surrounding really tiny text - bonus marks for detecting low contrast or unreadable text by analyzing the markup.
Well, that was how it was done in the mid-'90s. These days, you'd put the text in a SEO div that you would then remove via JavaScript. For extra points, you could remove it in response to a mouse move event or similar, so that even if the search engine's crawler used a JavaScript engine it would still see the fake text.
There is also no suggestion that this markup will be the primary factor in ranking search results.
The problem with that, is that metadata is only useful if things make use of it. If search engines are going to use it, that makes it worth a lot o
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This isn't meant to replace the page's content, just to annotate it (point out the semantic structure). So that the page consumer can understand that "6/10" means a rating or that "John Smith" is a person's name.
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Thats exactly what i was thinking. It just makes more sense that search results should be based off of what is actually on the page, not what the developer whats you to think is on the page. Another problem I have are things like this (taken from the documentation on schema.org)
<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2011-05-08T19:30">May 8, 7:30pm</time>
Is that really necessary? Is it that hard to parse that string into a valid timestamp? The only reason I can think of would be if someone want
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Might be a better example... also, it allows for a easier client-side reformatting in JS.
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Yes it is, generally speaking, hard to parse strings into date and time.
What date or time does "Tomorrow", "Next friday", "7/5/09", "6 o 'clock", or "directly after lunch" refer to ? Keep in mind that the document may not be current - and make sure to take into account different time-zones and different conventions for dates. (in particular, some odd countries like to print dates as M/D/Y where the least-significant part is in the *middle*)
May 8, 7:30pm is better than average - but you're still left with th
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and most of the world outside the US uses 31/12/1990, which is fine until you get to 1/2/1992
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Yeah. Though arguably even 31/12/1990 is suboptimal, it -does- have the advantage of not having the least-significant-part in the *middle*, but it still, for example, sorts wrong regardless of if you sort numerically or alphabetically.
Generally, the most significant part should be -first-
1990-05-30 is superior for this reason, it sorts correctly both numerically and alphabetically, and follows the general convention we have of having the most significant part come FIRST.
URLs suffer from the same problem, wi
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Let's not dredge up the bang path wars.
And I'm not holding my breath for the world to switch to year first dates. US will go metric first.
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<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2011-05-08T19:30">May 8, 7:30pm</time>
<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2011-05-08T19:30">Mai 8, 19:30</time>
<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2011-05-08T19:30">Mei 8, 19:30</time>
<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2011-07-08T19:30">July 8, 7:30pm</time>
<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2011-07-08T19:30">Jul 8, 7:30pm</time>
<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2011-07-08T19:30">Juillet 8, 19:30
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Really. Do you have a reliable parser for common date formats that works in all languages and scripts? If so I'd be keen for a reference.
Or is this a comment by someone with the typical ASCII-is-all-we-need view of the world?
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Yes, it is that hard to parse a timestamp. People are inconsistent. You might see "7:00" (unadorned), "7:00a", "7:00 AM", "7AM", "07:00", and "7 o'clock" all in the same document. And dates are nearly impossible. When is 1/2/11? January 2nd or February 1st? 2011 or 1911?
Of course, I don't think this proposal is going to make things any better. If the display data was generated directly from the metadata, maybe. But as soon as someone touches it by hand you're going to see the two get out of sync. I
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When is 1/2/11? January 2nd or February 1st? 2011 or 1911?
Silly. It's clearly February 11th, the year 1. Or 1901. Or 2001.
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Really? So, on a site like Slashdot, with a wide variety of locales represented, what would the algorithm do with "11/4/2011"? Would it surmise that, in the case of Slashdot, it may be m/d/y, it may be d/m/y, but it's probably just a bunch of nerds arguing and shouldn't be indexed at all? Metadata is made for having a standard way to describing loosely defined data; the example of an ambiguous date is such a great example because there are plenty of valid human-understandable date representations that will
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Yes, we found that to be more useful - until website administrators learned to put false information into what is actually being presented on the page.
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Re:How is this different than the MetaData tag? (Score:5, Informative)
Meta keywords and descriptions are used to replace content, which can be abused. This is used to annotate content, not replace it. It simply let's you say what the content is supposed to represent (a recipe, or a rating, or a person, etc).
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Dammit (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a whore and have to do whatever the big guys say, because I want their traffic. Ok, so I admit it.
But dammit, did it have to be microdata? I already mark up with microformat classes and RDFa (both the sortof standardized namespaces and Google's) and Google was handling it pretty well, and every once in a while it looked like Yahoo grokked it too. Microdata was the ugly stepchild third choice, the least well-supported one, with the fewest number of parsers out there in the wild.. So I left that one out, because nobody cared. Now it's going to be The One?
I have better things to do than add Yet Another fucking attribute to my generated HTML which is already bloated with otherwise unnecessary classes and properties and typeofs. Now I'm going to have itemscope and itemtype attributes too, huh? Just how many characters long can we make each element become, just so that everything can make sense of it? Fuck you guys. No seriously, fuck you. Yes, I'm going to do it anyway, but even so, fuck you.
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I was really expecting for RDFa to win the competition, it had already a decent user base and it's much more flexible and useful.
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That there is what you call a "compromise candidate" - the one everyone objects to the least. Surprising though that Google, Microsoft & Yahoo got together on something like this outside the context of an industry group like W3C.
As to your better things to do, go ahead and do them - I assume you're a working web developer, so this really can be viewed as a revenue-generating opportunity. Think of it as a chance to tack an extra "SEO structuring" charge on top. If you're not doing them, I know I will!
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Ouch! Damn, that's cold.
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I'm ignoring everything except RDFa on my site. I took the decision of dropping the HTML5 markup for HTML+RDFa and getting the pages validating properly (still using CSS3, though).
It would be great if Google had support for DOAP (Definition of a Project) for open source projects and read that through RDFa.
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Good comments - thanks. You sound like someone who could help me: what's the difference between microformats and microdata? I thought the two were synonymous until this recent announcement and now lots of people are talking about them as if they are different. I've been googling but the conversation still seems pretty confused. What I think I make out is that microdata is a specific implementation of using microformats, designed to handle many use-cases that RDFa handles for the web?
Any help would be apprec
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Fuck Google, Fuck Bing. We have the power - Use IT!
The same type of power as the Brownian motion. And THEY are using it by having the appropriate containment cylinders and pistons to guide this motion - of course, in their interest.
Be careful with Microsoft (Score:2)
I say 'be careful with Microsoft' because if my memory serves me well, Microsoft had some agreement with now defunct SUN Microsystems over Java and its use...that was until SUN realized that Microsoft had a hidden agenda [internetnews.com].
Nothing will prevent Microsoft from attempting to pull off what I will call a 'SUN moment.'
It's a Trap! (Score:2)
Terms of service
This is a contract between you and each of the sponsors of Schema.org: Google, Inc., Yahoo, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation (referred to collectively in this agreement as the "Sponsors", "we" or "us"). By using the Schema.org website (the "Website") you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions (the "Terms of Service").
Changes in Website and Terms and Conditions; Change in Schema
We may modify or terminate the Website, for any reason, and without notice. We also reserve the right to modify these Terms of Service from time to time without notice, and you expressly agree to be bound by such modifications when posted on the Website.
This legalese basically says: By using the schema.org website, (esp. their schemas) you agree to whatever we want forever. THE END.
Even Facebook's horrid TOS agreement is better for you than this, at least you can terminate Facebook's agreement.
I for one rebel against our Gigantic Corporate Lawyer-wielding privacy-and-competition-hating overlords. If I can't get past the TOS page, I'll just stick to RDFa. Just added "0.0.0.0 schema.org" to my hosts file just in case I get link-baited into agre
Re:It's a Trap! (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right, it is a trap, but it gets worse:
The short summary: The "Sponsors" (read: cartel) may have patents on this crap. You can, for now, use the crap royalty free for markup only if you follow the standard. Non-cartel search engines are not granted such rights. In addition, future versions may not be royalty free. Your existing markup is safe, but any new versions or pages won't be.
The actual fine print:
In addition, if the Sponsors have patent claims that are necessarily infringed by including markup of structured data in a webpage, where the markup is based on and strictly complies with the Schema, they grant an option to receive a license under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms without royalty, solely for the purpose of including markup of structured data in a webpage, where the markup is based on and strictly complies with the Schema. [..] Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Sponsors agree that no change that we make to these Terms of Service will terminate or modify the license granted under paragraph 1 above with respect to any use or implementation of the Schema occurring prior to the date that the change is published.
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Far too many terms of services require you to give up a limb and your first-born child for this to mean much.
Oh, because other terms are abusive, we should just ignore this one? The only way things are going to be less abusive is when people refuse what is being offered because of them.
And of course, consider that Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo to an extent are still competitors. They're not going to go cartel on all new search engines, and notice the "if" at the beginning of the clause.
Even if they are competitors, they would happily lock out any new competitors. The fact that they have granted themselves this patent capability, and given all the abusive patent bullshit we've seen recently, there's no reason to trust them. They could easily just have given everybody a royalty free license on any patents related to
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You got so outraged that you apparently missed the next sentence: Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Sponsors agree that no change that we make to these Terms of Service will terminate or modify the license granted under paragraph 1 above with respect to any use or implementation of the Schema occurring prior to the date that the change is published.
No, I understood it perfectly to make no sense. Here, big words are used to confuse you... Let me translate: notwithstanding: in spite of. Irregardless ... you agree to be bound [by the TOS]."
foregoing: What we said prior to this point.
paragraph 1: The first paragraph "This is a contract
Irregardless of [Us granting you CC copyright license, and possibly terminating your right to use the schema if we don't agree on a patent license (that we are allowed to assert and charge for) ] we agree that no fut
Why? (Score:2)
Wasn't this the issue that XML, XSD, XSLT and XSLT-FO supposed to address? Document verbiage aside, don't these families adequately cover the issue of structure, and semantics?
If the issue is to teach the browser/search engine, the document semantics -- can't they (MS,Yahoo,Google) actually parse XML for common dictionary words and build semantics themselves? Why make humans do all the tedious annotations? They can probably p
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XML, XSD, XSLT and XSLT-FO
Which of those have anything to do with semantics?
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XML, XSD, XSLT and XSLT-FO
Which of those have anything to do with semantics?
True, more to do with structure than semantics, but usually semantics can be derived from structure, if the structure is meaningful.
For example: <Thing> <Place> <Volcano></Volcano></Place></Thing> . . .
A meaningful structure in XML can itself lead to semantics. XSLT, XSL-FO can then just transform it to whatever flavor.
What I am trying to understand here is that -- why do we have to micro-annotate everything? Can't search engines/browsers do
I get sex if I clean the dishes (Score:2)
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No cigar, the answer you're looking for was... (Score:2)
I hope the companies would just put their efforts in creating a semantic web, instead of trying to hack-patch html by adding random meta-data for the purpose of search. Seriously.. focus people!
Focus!
The analogy here... (Score:2)
Is if amazon, walmart and ebay decided to come up with a common tagging system for shopping searches.
This does not change how web page are displayed only how they are tagged for search engines.
Having the top 3 search engines in the world come to a common agreement is not a bad thing.
These three search engines have represented 95%+ of the search engine market for the last 5 years.
When 95% of the market decides on a common standard that is THE standard regardless of any hand waving
by the "de jure" standards b
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Hear hear. I don't have to like it but I'm going to have to live with it. And if FB hops onto this bandwagon, it's totally finito.
Dear W3C, (Score:2)
You are not the "entire web community". You seem to have not realised this last time, when everyone implemented the WHATWG's HTML standard instead of your XHTML 2.0 pet project. Please get relevant or get bent.
Adding meaning to HTML is almost exactly backward (Score:2)
Who is the entire web community ? (Score:3)
Manu Sporny, [...] (said), "The entire Web community should decide which features should be supported – not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo."
So just who is the entire Web community? It certainly isn't W3C, who effectively bar individuals and SME's with their $8000 annual membership fees.
The corporations are only interested in establishing or brokering leverage.
The IETF isn't the easiest means of establishing support for a feature, and not many of us have read all 6000 odd RFCs anyhow.
So, basically, who cares what schema org says, or Manu Sporny for that matter?
Since when has anyone been able to make a change to the status quo?
Re:All I'm hearing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
For those out of the loop: this is funnier when you are aware of a certain alarmingly long schedule [techrepublic.com] proposed by Ian Hickson, which would not see HTML 5 completely finished until 2020 or 2022 depending on your definition.
Incidentally, this problem is similar to why the Athenians abandoned democracy [wikipedia.org] (lack of rapid response) and has been presented as an explanation for why Lisp isn't as popular as it once was [winestockwebdesign.com] (endless disagreements about how to do things.)
The really remarkable part, though, is that they're making any progress at all with HTML5, so some kudos is in order.
Re:All I'm hearing is... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All I'm hearing is... (Score:5, Funny)
ooo, snide Perl 6 remark would go here if I were immature
Perl, wasn't that an early pre-release beta of Python...?
"Three signs shall there be before the end: the duke of atoms shall walk forever, the sixth pearl be released, and the freeman lift his crowbar thrice..."
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(pauses to snort more volcanic fumes)
and the Orders of the Red Whorl and the Arch of Blueness shall claim the deceived followers from the once-righteous wealthy African merchant, for his falling into great sin, of confounding the Portal of Knowledge with his evil Unification spell that bends the eyesight and hinders the labors of man
Not so remarkable.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really all that remarkable. The main progress comes from the whole WhatWG efforts which in turn is basically the major browser makers saying "Screw you moving-like-molasses people and your incompatible XHTML 2.0, we'll just do things the way we agree to do them and everybody else can follow along or stay behind."
Same story here, except now it's not the major browser makers, but the major search engine companies - who want to be able to more easily index information. Why wait for what webmasters and users want, when your search engine(s) pretty much control the market and the webmaster really has little choice but to either follow along or stay behind?
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as they all get along and the things introduced aren't wonderful in principle but a nightmare in practice (frames, anyone?)
Note that the system used is very much in line with HTML5 veering well away from the XHTML 2.0 changes, in that rather than introducing new elements that a browser or other parser could easily choke on, it introduces new properties which are easily ignored.
Better yet it's based on HTML5 (Score:2)
A big part of his complaint is that RDFa scales better than Microdata which is what Schema.org uses, so both should be supported. Microdata is part of HTML5, and is an extension of Microforms, created exactly because RDFa is considered too complex.
This is exactly a case of WhatWG producing workable standards and W3C creating design by committee monstrosities.
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Note: poster takes one sentence from the wikipedia summary, and infers that the article cited supports her (?) claim. In fact, the sentence referred to reads: "One downside was that the new democracy was less capable of rapid response." The downside is not mentioned again in the lengthy section. Many other criticisms of Athenian democracy are discussed at much greater length (including its extreme severity, its overreaching its own laws, and its conviction of Socrates) than the one she (?) chooses to highl
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I apologise; it appears that I conflated some details of the Four Hundred with the democracy that it interrupted.
You could have been more polite about it, though.
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Polite? This is Slashdot. But to be fair, being polite rarely gets anything other than passed over here.
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Slightly off-topic but...
Ancient authors were almost invariably from an elite background for whom giving poor and uneducated people power over their betters seemed a reversal of the proper, rational order of society. For them the demos in democracy meant not the whole people, but the people as opposed to the elite. Instead of seeing it as a fair system under which 'everyone' has equal rights, they saw it as the numerically preponderant poor tyrannizing over the rich.
LOL some things never change...
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-don't actually care about the number of people making the decision so much as they care that they were not ONE of that number
-are more interested in trying to sound smart than doing anything.
or
-are opposed for some reason to the outcome of the decision but don't have any really convincing arguments to make against it
"The entire Web community should decide which features sho
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It doesn't matter what standard they float. It will be dumped in less than five years anyway for the next big gimmick.. I remember a time when real standards would last 50 years or more. You know.. like film, phones, roads, electricity, NTSC, PAL, ohm's law, arithmetic, spelling of words, money...
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The computing world moves at a MUCH faster pace because it needs to evolve... 50 year computer standards would be a TERRIBLE idea.
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You mean... the entire web community "can" or "will" be the ones to decide whether they will cooperate with the source of most, if not almost all, of their traffic? And what happens when Google, Microsoft and Yahoo agree to index the syntax they agreed to propose? That's a lot of weight to be pitted against. Even more weight than that (frankly, Apple and Adobe) which undermined the "web community" by choosing h.264 over any free alternative. Don't mistake the fact that there's a "standards process" with "pu
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The thing is that web standards are only of use if all the major browser vendors (that is MS, mozilla, apple and google) actually support them. Since the w3c has no power to force browser vendors to implement their standards and since many of the vendors are deeply opposed on key issues (such as video codecs) they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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It really is of no use if the person browsing the site doesn't use it.
Nope, it's useful even if you're browsing with IE6, since search engines and other aggregators can use it to improve their services. Try searching for something like "baked spagetthi recipe" on Google.
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How do you think Google could show you those stars with the ratings, the number of calories, the time the recipe takes, etc? The pages are tagged with the hRecipe and hReview microformats.
Sure, it's not a life changing effect, but it was just an example, there will be many others.
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Because they're not a search engine?
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Apple does not need a search engine, all information is pre approved for your consumption =)
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Since when is Apple a search engine?
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To be entirely fair, it actually does make a lot of sense for browsers to consume stuff like this -- microformats would've been my first choice, but whatever. Consider: Right now, browsers can and do support discovering RSS feeds related to the current page. There's also a spec somewhere for a "universal edit button". Other things that might be relevant are hcalendar and hcard -- sure, search engines could consume these, but it'd also be cool to have my browser discover these things and communicate with my
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Metadata like this is not intended for browsers. It's intended for webmasters to indicate to search engines what exactly is in their pages.
Why the heck not? What law of nature determines that a "search engine" (whatever that is) is permitted to build powerful data-driven services, but that a "browser" (whatever that is) is not? RDFa specifies, in its abstract: "When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience: an event
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Creating new versions of HTML has increasingly become the proverbial lipstick on the proverbial pig. But now they've made browsers into application platform and all the horrors and inadequacies are being magnified.
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Yahoo has been a pretty prominent contributor to developer tools for "web 2.0" and have probably had a great deal more impact than their market position would predict. That influence isn't going to vanish overnight.
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So yahoo is to blame for this bloated web 2.0 buzzword shit that sprang up? Where simple damm text pages now take megs instead of a couple k?
The tools can certainly be used that way, but don't dictate it. YUI is modular, so it can be pretty lightweight while still providing good library functionality over the standard DOM. That said, it probably isn't best suited for "text pages", and neither is most "web 2.0" type functionality. Blame the library collectors, not the library developers.
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I'm actually ok with google deciding things.
I'm not. Don't trust any company any further than you can throw them. Google has already walked pretty far down the path of corporate evil.
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The great thing about metadata is that it provides worlds of opportunity to differentiate featuresets while maintaining interoperability; that is, to offer your custom functionality beyond the scope of the standard, rather than contrary to it.
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<div about="urn:ISBN:0967686563">I, for <span content="viagra">one</span>, welcome <span resource="http://www.goatse.bz/">our</span> new mark-up vocabulary overlords.</div>
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To be fair I'd imagine he really just meant the W3C members.
This makes sense because the membership is wide and varied representing pretty much every industry with an interest in the web and some consumer organisations too.
I sympathise with his view, HTML5 was put together by a handful of vested interests- Apple, Google, Mozilla and frankly they've done a shite job. HTML5 has been put together in an atrocious way that can be made to work on the desktop (and phones, but they're just like desktop browsers now