In my BarCamp round-up I commented on RDF getting a strong showing in presentations. It caught my eye and I came out feeling optimistic about the future of rich data on the web. Don’t misinterpret that sentence as RDF enthusiasm yet, though.
The thing about RDF is that no-one has yet demonstrated any real-world reason to care about it. It fascinates academics who would love — just for the sake of it — to model the entire universe in triples but in the real world of web browsers the value has never really been promoted.
You may wish to watch Ian Forresters recording of the RDF vs. microformats discussion. It’s all very tongue in cheek of course, but still exposes some big misconceptions the RDF folks have which are going to hold them back.
In a general sense, I think some in the world of RDF are bitter about microformats. RDF has been in development for so many years and no-one of importance in the consumer world has cared. An upstart technology; hacky, rough around the edges and full of self-proclaimed imperfection bursts onto the scene and in 18 months makes data sexy. Oh, and of course microformats don’t require XML.
Here’s the thing, if you’re passionate about RDF for whatever reason and think microformats has stolen some thunder that you deserved, you need to get over this. Right now. Thank you. Now let’s continue.
As someone who does enjoy considering academic problems from time to time, I’m not going to dismiss the potential usefulness of RDF. Of course the open ended nature of it could result in some ingenious mash-ups — given enough real world data. But RDF does have big problems that need to be overcome.
The biggest technical barrier for RDF has actually been solved; publishing no-longer requires XML nor hidden duplication of the data that’s already in your page. The microformats mantra of ‘publish once’ could work, thanks to a technique called eRDF. With technicalities hurdled, what remains is primarily attitude.
First up, XML. While eRDF makes it optional and allows the same HTMLTidy-based parsing techniques as microformats use, it remains that advocates of RDF are somewhat inclined to be advocates of XML, XHTML and (worst) XHTML2 as well. The XML web hasn’t happened. It may never happen. Ian Forrester’s comment in the linked presentation that ‘we need XHTML’ is both discouraging to publishers and misleading. You don’t need it at all. Publishing will always be more important. Publishers find HTML easier to publish than valid, well formed XHTML. If you try and pull XHTML evangelism into RDF evangelism, publishers are going to dismiss both in the same breath. HTML is alive and kicking, and if you want to use our data on the web you’re going to have to parse HTML to get it.
Then there’s the ‘relationship’ with microformats. Standing up and pushing an agenda of ‘microformats aren’t powerful enough, RDF is better’ is strikingly parallel to ‘HTML isn’t powerful enough, use XML’. You know how that argument ends — and it has ended. Microformats do their job very well. They know and are designed for their limitations, they’re publisher-centric and the tools that have been written to harness them are user-centric. That’s what the web is all about and microformats has solved the problem of publishing contact and event information.
Yes, microformats are harder to parse than XML but that’s because the people who write parsers are more capable of handling the complexity than publishers are. The philosophy is that parsers only have to be written once, while the format will be published over and over. Any extra hours taken to write a more liberal parser are saved many times over by the thousands of people who are going to publish the data.
Additionally, can we please nip this ‘microformats have better branding; it’s all marketing’ attitude right now? It’s true that microformats have a fantastic website thanks to some very talented people. But the suggestion that a hip logo and high profile evangelists is enough to push adoption of new technology to real people without it being genuinely useful as well is utterly laughable, verging on out-right offensive to those who worked on developing it.
If microformats didn’t have the balance of usefulness and ease-of-use right then no bugger would use them. Simple. The evangelists would be dismissed as nerds, the logo stolen for some other purpose and the web would carry on regardless. Summoning Jon Hicks to our — Dan Cederholm produced — green-squared alter for the ritual sacrifice in fire of all the fluffy animals on earth would not rescue a broken technology. Microformats are not broken; the limits are designed.
So lets look ahead. The RDF community is trying to get established in the same world as microformats with eRDF and frankly, good luck to them. The more rich data published on the web the better. The microformats process is not for every application. The process depends on existing real-world publishing; it is designed to rule out the ‘invention’ of new formats. RDF positively embraces people creating their own custom formats on a whim, with an attitude of ‘sink or swim’ instead.
But there are two things. If you’re working with RDF, show me something new. Don’t just rehash vcard and icalendar into your own format; I’m not interested. I know it makes for a clever demo, but it’s a solved problem. People have learned how to do it with microformats and no-one is going to switch to a different syntax just for the sake of it — especially not fellow geeks who know only too well you could just transform the microformat into RDF when you need to.
New formats that solve new and different problems will attract attention and support though. At the end of the day, no-one cares what the name of the technology is that solves our problems. If it works, is easy enough to publish and provides useful enhancement to people’s experience of the web then people will use it.
Solving the same problems twice won’t get that response. In fact, I suspect if someone visits ‘eRDF.org’ and just sees ‘how to write microformats with a different syntax’ then they’ll move along quick. The RDF versions of vcard and icalendar need to be a the very bottom of your examples list, if you even publish them at all.
And finally, you’ve got to make the real-world, end-user benefits available at the same time. Standing up and saying ‘we can do some really vague, open ended stuff with this data’ won’t attract anyone.
At the very least you need practical demos that people can download, install and carry with them. Also, web pipes ala Technorati’s contact and event converters have been a huge success. Remember, there’s no native microformats UI in any web browser, but people can and do use them right now. Just with the addition of a hyperlink in a page microformats become a technology of ‘now’ and not ‘the future’. It’s proved the most fantastic interim means of bringing microformat functionality to all users, whilst the browser manufacturers build their native full-scale UI into upcoming releases.
Tom Morris ‘gets it’, I think. He’s launching a new effort called Get Semantic which aims to organise the public face of RDF and could well provide a vehicle for much of what I’ve written above to happen. I think it will be worth keeping an eye on.
Penultimately, I want to pre-empt a possible comment. I haven’t mentioned RDFa at all in this lengthy piece. This is because RDFa is a rubbish idea.
RDF has gotten a lot of deserved criticism over the years for being too conceptual and focusing only on solving imaginary problems that didn’t concern anyone outside academic communities. As mash-up culture promotes the publishing of interoperable data, the number of real-world problems that interoperable data can solve has increased. Microformats is capable of solving some and I think RDF is capable of solving some others. I just hope that the right kind of people get involved to try and make it happen.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.