RDFa in HTML
A number of efforts seem to have sprouted up in the past few days:
Undoubtedly, this will be controversial. Some will minimize the actual and real problems that this proposal presents. Others will blow minor details out of proportion. To both of these, my attitude is the same: this too, shall pass. What will remain will be both messy and useful.
Meanwhile, what appeals to me is a greater irony. This effort is an offshoot of a decision that (with the full benefit of 20-20 hindsight) demonstrated a great deal of hubris in the far distant past. Some will say that the epitome of this is XHTML2 which attempts to solve many of the same use cases as XHTML1, but starts with a clean slate. An effort to which the browser vendors expressed a collective meh. Time, invention, implementation experience, deployment, and feedback from the likes of Creative Commons, Yahoo!, and Google occurred. And we are now seeing the messy and useful results.
Meanwhile, time, invention, implementation experience, deployment, and feedback from the likes of Apple, Opera, and Mozilla also occurred. Messy and useful results were produced. Recently, this produced an offshoot to solve the same uses cases as RDFa, but with a clean slate.
I’m reminded of the words of Lawrence Lessig:
- Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
- The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
- Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
- Ours is less and less a free society.