Blog @ Digital Bazaar

Thoughts on HTML5, RDFa and Microformats

The other major scalability limitation of Microformats, that is not going to be fixed, is the issue of vocabulary term collisions. Microformats do not have namespaces and in fact, namespaces are considered harmful in the Microformats community.

RDFa employs prefixes in an attempt to ease authoring of RDFa web pages and to provide a mechanism when differentiating between vocabulary terms. This means that two people can use the word “title” in their vocabulary without clashing. Not so in the world of Microformats, “title” means “job title” and even though there have been many attempts to change the definition of “title”, it has stuck. This means that if someone were to create a Microformat-like vocabulary that used the word “title”, not only would it go against the definition set by the Microformats community, but it would also confuse the Microformat parser if there was also an hCard on the same page.

The WHATWG seems to misunderstand the purpose of the Microformats community…

2 Comments

1. This post describes almost precisely the process we’ve gone through at playtheweb.org to create a semantic format around licensing and attribution. We even had a title tag…

   Some of our thoughts are articled here:
   http://playtheweb.org/2008/09/19/namespaces-microformats-rdfa-html-xhtml/

   Thanks for a very succinct summary, Manu.

   Comment by Rob Linton — September 24, 2008 #

2. Great summary, you’ve clarified some of the issues that had been troubling me about HTML5.

   Comment by Sam — August 4, 2009 #

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.