RDFa vs. microformats

Question

What do you think is best? RDFa or microformats?

In the future what do you think: Will prevail both (using tools like GRRDL to make them "talk") or only one (like what happen with HD-DVD and Blu-ray)?

Answer 1

I am confident that RDFa will prevail, becaue microformats lift the web only by a few centimeters, and once microformats would be enjoying broad popularity, advances in natural language processing will achieve the same level of performance. RDFa, in turn, can be created with almost the simplicity of microformats but easily expanded to detailed and precise data structures, which carry the full amount of structure across the Web. Plus, it integrates well with the Web architecture.

See e.g. the GoodRelations vocabulary for e-commerce for Yahoo, link below.

The additional markup is a bit more verbose, but very feasible. At the same time, you can easily reuse and integrate data chunks from other resources.

For the the GoodRelations developer wiki and cook book, see

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Best wishes Martin Hepp

Answer 2

I think both will prevail. They have different audiences.

RDFa (or Microdata or any other variation of URL-based triples) is much more extensible and scallable solution, so if Semantic Web is ever going to happen, it will require markup more powerful than Microformats.

However, Microformats have lower barrier to entry. They're conceptually simpler and more focused on particular vocabularies. It's harder for novices to work with limitless solution that doesn't have bounds to guide them. URI-based namespaces are confusing (you use URLs for something that's not really a page) and error-prone (seemingly unimportant difference like extra slash or www. makes different namespace).

If you look how HTML tagsoup vs XHTML work out, it's clear that majority goes for the simplest solution that barely does the job, even at cost of extensibility, elegance, etc.

Similar thing may happen with uf vs RDFa. Most users will mindlessly copy&paste code and try to learn from source of others' pages, and I think Microformats have bigger chance of survival in such situation.

OTOH more advanced webmasters (and CMSes) will use RDFa, because once you learn it, it's more robust and more expressive.

Answer 3

Microformats are domain-specific for a small handful of domains. RDF(a) has whole systems for formalizing ontologies, eradicating ambiguity of meaning, and no domain-allegiance. It seems a no-brainer to me to be coo-ing over "ooh, hCard" etc when there's RDFa and GRDDL (which is also great but imposes a load on third-party websites, unfortunately) to be playing with.