Will the ’semantic web’ see XHTML finally supercede HTML?
Theres’ been a bit of news recently about the ’semantic web‘ (or data web) with Yahoo! announcing that their new Search Open Ecosystem will support semantic web standards, thereby providing a far richer and more useful search experience. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, even believes that the rise of the semantic web could see the wane of Google.
The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database.
David Peterson, on his blog at Sitepoint, has had quite a bit to say about the issue and one of the points he makes is that, if you haven’t already, there are two things you can do to take advantage of this trend: learn Microformats and learn RDFa.
I’ve already been implementing Microformats in some of my work but haven’t yet touched RDFa. RDFa is an official W3C recommendation whereas Microformats has emerged from an unofficial grassroots movement. Even though RDF (which RDFa is based on) has been around longer (2001) than Microformats (2003), Microformats seems to have had a larger take-up ‘in the wild’.
I don’t have enough experience with either yet to say which is better but there are marked differences between the two formats and the possibility that one may have to give way to the other eventually. And one of the comments I found interesting from David Peterson’s blogs was:
It (RDFa) has its own markup that is currently valid only with XHTML (there are some moves to get a profile going for HTML 4) and its own learning curve.
What I’d like to know is how likely is it that a profile for HTML 4 (or 5) would be developed? I did some searching, but didn’t come up with any answers. Because if there is not going to be any support for RDFa within HTML, and RDFa does indeed emerge to be the most widely used format, and the semantic web does indeed become as widespread and pervasive as Tim Berners-Lee would have us believe, could RDFa be the first reason to use XHTML that would have widespread, non-esoteric benefit?
What do I mean by that? Well, unless you’re using XSLT for tranforming documents, MathML, SMIL, SVG, or Ruby annotations, there’s currently not much real world benefit to using XHTML over HTML (especially if you’re serving your content as text/html) for the majority of websites out there. (Yes I know this website still does just that, but most of my recent work has seen me using HTML over XHTML.) But if the semantic web really takes off – and with the huge popularity of social networking I can see how it quite easily could – and the only way to tap into it is to use XHTML, will that mean that XHTML does indeed become the future of the web that the W3C envisioned?
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how the implementation of the semantic web evolves and also how concrete are moves to create a HTML-capable RDFa profile or whether XHTML will finally supercede HTML because it’s the only way to take advantage of RDFa.
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AjaxLine | March 25th, 2008 at 2:41 pm [...]Will the ’semantic web’ see XHTML finally supercede HTML?[...]
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2Allan's Library | May 30th, 2008 at 7:14 am
has come and gone. What did I learn? XML is not easy. Programming is even tough business, not for the faint of heart or mind. The main challenge that I had, and made my head spin, was learning the complexities behindXHTMLand XSLT. A powerful tool for the construction of the Semantic Web is XHTML. Most people are acquainted with the “meta” tags which can be used to embed metadata about the document as a whole. Yet there are more powerful, granular techniques available
