Internet Alchemy » Google’s RDFa a Damp Squib

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Google’s RDFa a Damp Squib

It’s been an interesting week for embedding metadata in HTML. Yesterday I was exploring html5 microdata and today Google announce support for RDFa . At first this announcement seemed like a big deal – Google supporting the web of data in a big way, a real push into the world of open structured data. However, a closer look reveals that Google have basically missed the point of RDFa. The RDFa support is limited to the properties and classes defined on a hastily thrown together site called data-vocabulary.org . There you will find classes for Person and Organization and properties for names and addresses, completely ignoring the millions of pieces of data using well established terms from FOAF and the like. That means everyone has to rewrite all their data to use Google’s schema if they want to be featured on Google’s search engine. Its like saying you have to write your pages using Google’s own version of html where all the tags have slightly different spellings to be listed in their search engine!

The result is a hobbled implementation of RDFa. They’ve taken the worst part – the syntax – and thrown away the best – the decentralized vocabularies of terms. It’s like using microformats without the one thing they do well: the simplicity. This is why I believe Google missed the point. They made the mistake of treating RDFa as an alternative to microformats, which completely ignores its true strength as a structured data format.

As I twittered earlier: it seems odd that Google, a company that thrived on the open messy web, seeks to ignore it and go for a controlled vocabulary. I’m hoping that this is just a toe in the water and more will come. But there’s a part of ...

Original URL

http://iandavis.com/blog/2009/05/googles-rdfa-a-damp-squib

http://iandavis.com/blog/2009/05/googles-rdfa-a-damp-squib