microformats, rdf or microdata

Question

Hi. is there any difference between using one of this technologies? I'm building now a site using HTML5, and I'm having hard time to decide which of them to use. I cannot see any difference between them, else the syntax size, which i'm not quiet sure is an advantage for the microformats side.

Answer 1

RDFa -> more resources (blank nodes, CURIE etc..)

Microformarts -> simply and popular, minor resources and no support to custom vocabularies

Microdata -> cool itemref resource, very very new...

Answer 2

Microformats: the oldest and the simplest of the three. If the existing specs cover your needs (that is, you want to mark up addresses, events, friend links, or another one of the supported data types), then they are a nice and practical choice. The problem is that you cannot make your own microformat if you want to mark up some kind of data that's not supported by the official specs.

RDFa: This one is based on W3C's RDF data model (it's basically a way of embedding RDF data into HTML pages). RDF has been around for a long time and there's a large amount of fancy tools for doing stuff with RDF data (stores, search engines, query languages, graph visualizers and so on). So RDFa takes you into this big existing ecosystem. But this also makes RDFa kind of complicated, and the learning curve is steeper than for the other proposals.

Microdata: This is Ian Hickson's counter-proposal to RDFa. In spirit, it is an extensible version of microformats. It doesn't have the RDF connection and is simpler than RDFa. It's still very new and hasn't seen much adoption yet, so it's a bit early to tell.

My recommendation would be to go with microformats if they cover your need, and RDFa otherwise.