The Data (Semantic) Web -- and RDFa: Preparing web sites for the Data (Semantic) Web RDFa - Interoperable Web Metadata James
Dude, so do I have to learn BOTH of them? So Apple supports one (hCard I think), but Apple has 3% of the US marketshare (more like 0% in my country), so how do I know I'm not picking BetaMax (nevermind that was the better technology, it lost the market)?? I've already got two sites that definitely need to go in this direction at some point. But how do we know when we're jumping in too early? How different are the bloggers making these tags and steering development?? My sites will be nothing and do nothing like blogs, friendofafriend, mycrapspace... these are apparently on the bleeding edge of this stuff. How do real businesses decide where to steer the resources? I'm more than willing to learn one of these microformats or RDFa (prolly not both at the same time), but that costs time which means it costs money. When do we know which investment to make and when?? And... I have to convert my HTML4.01 Strict sites over to XHTML1.0 served as text/html? Good thing they were already well-formed and don't have nbsp's or rdquo's floating around...
"RDFa is set to become the W3C’s standard for embedding metadata into web pages. This is the key to unlocking the true power of linked data. RDFa speaks the native tongue of the Semantic Web, RDF." -- David Peterson, Sitepoint: XHTML/RDFa Syntax & Processing XHTML/RDFa Primer
Yeah but Yahoo did both cause they didn't know who would win the battle and the microformats people are really spreading around fast. If they get popular enough before the w3c gets off its duff and makes something, it may become a "default standard" or worse, a split so we get the same crap as with RSS (three different types, gawd).