I’m so pumped right now! I just stumbled across the RDFa Primer 1.0, and I’m aglow about the future.

I’ve long been interested in the Semantic Web, RDF, FOAF, and such. The whole time, I’ve pined for a way to more closely marry XHTML and RDF. Doing so would make it more feasible to author in the first place and easier to maintain. I have a FOAF file, but it still lists my job from a year ago.

The primer describes RDFa, which is basically a collection of best practices and examples for how to describe RDF triples inside the constructs of XHTML 2.0. This would let us do neat stuff like:

<p class="contactinfo" about="http://example.org/staff/jo"
       xmlns:contact="http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0#">
        My name is
        <meta property="contact:fn">
            Jo Smith
        </meta>.
        I'm a
        <meta property="contact:title">
            distinguished web engineer
        </meta>
        at
        <a rel="contact:org" href="http://example.org">
            Example.org
        </a>.
        You can contact me
        <a rel="contact:email" href="mailto:jo@example.org">
            via email
        </a>.
    </p>

Unfortunately, it requires XHTML 2.0. Or maybe fortunately. I always like playing with new stuff, and I’m getting sicker and sicker of supporting IE. Hurry up, W3C! Finish the specs.