Web Teacher » RDFa

Useful links: Microdata and RDFa, protocol relative, Inclusion, validators

vdebolt — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:04:27 +0000

Microdata and RDFa Living Together in Harmony from Jeni’s Musings is valuable reading for anyone interested in the semantic web. It’s a long article full of fine-grained suggestions. She concludes,

Regardless, there are lessons that RDFa and microdata could learn from each other, and changes to both languages that would help developers use them on their own, switch between them and mix them in the same document. I expect and welcome debate about the viability and effectiveness of the changes and guidelines that I’ve suggested here.

Public discussion of Jeni’s post is on Google+ as well as her blog.

A matter of protocol talks about protocol relative URIs. From Adactio.

Back to School | What is inclusion?

Who’s Validating the Validators talks about the damage that invalid embed code picked up from 3rd party sites as content does to the Internet.

Useful Links: Simple CSS, semantic web, EE

vdebolt — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:12:00 +0000

Chris at CSS Tricks has a great post in Little CSS Stuff Newcomers Get Confused About.

Bing Brings it On (RFDa, that is) at Semantic Web:

Bing webmaster help site that indicates Microsoft wants to play nice with whatever markup approach webmasters want to implement – microdata, microformats, or RDFa. The site mark-up overview on the page referenced says that Bing’s “crawlers do not prefer one specification over another. It’s entirely up to you to decide which of the supported specifications best fits your data.”

Contrast that with Google’s initial commentary about the schema.org structured data markup schema.

If Expression Engine is your thing, or if you want to learn it, check out this series of EE Podcasts from Emily Lewis and Lea Alcantara.

Useful links: captioning YouTube, HTML5, or not, Final Cut Pro X

vdebolt — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:54:15 +0000

YouTube’s instructions on how to add captions to your video.

How is HTML5 changing web development? An interview with Remy Sharp.

Stop Obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3. Paul Boag has some ideas about what we should be thinking about instead of merely worrying about learning HTML5 and CSS3. What I want to know is does Paul – or any web educator – think topics like those he suggests need to be part of a comprehensive web education curriculum?

Microformats 2 and RFDa Collaboration references where these two are heading and includes a mention of schema.org. [See also: Modifying an hReview to include HTML from schema.org.]

Final Cut Pro Reactions:

Useful Links: HTML5 + RDFa, data visualization

vdebolt — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:29:40 +0000

HTML5 + RDFa = time to get rid of that 20th Century furniture is an interesting high level look at web interactions and a lot of specific hits on HTML5, RDFa, Drupal and SPARQL. Plus, just looking at this blog makes me feel good. Love the primary colors. It cheers me up almost as much as seeing a Miró.

The beauty of data visualization is David McCandless at a TED Talk. (Hat tip to DigitalDiva for pointing to it.) It’s worth your time to watch.

Useful Links: Facebook in class, HTML+RDFa, Windows 7

vdebolt — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:35:44 +0000

100 Ways You Should be Using Facebook in Your Classroom has some interesting ideas scattered through the list. You might find something you can use there.

HTML+RDFa is a first draft of the W3C’s proposed mechanism for embedding RDF in HTML. Review by those interested is invited by the W3C.

That thud you hear is people dumping Vista and installing Windows 7. Here are several Windows 7 reviews:

Windows 7: Review roundup CS Monitor
Windows 7 Review (Engadget)
Windows 7 Review (PC World)
A Video Tour of Windows 7 (PC Magazine)
Windows 7 Review (Digital Trends)
Why I Like Windows 7 (Datamation)

Useful Links: Snow Leopard and AT, HTML5 and RDFa, Flash accessibility, and writing tips

vdebolt — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:38:52 +0000

Snow Leopard Assistive Technology Compatibility List is a very helpful compilation of what works and what doesn’t work on Snow Leopard. From ATMac.

There are so many posts about HTML 5 and RDFa flying around these days that it’s hard to keep up with them all. But here’s one that takes a different approach, Burningbird’s Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: RDFa and HTML5′s Microdata.

Wendy Chisholm chimes in with What I’m Watching about HTML 5.

Adobe Flash Accessiblity: Best Practices is must reading for anyone teaching or using Flash. From Erik Johnson at Six Revisions.

FatDUX has 20 tips for writing for the web that are a great lesson for beginners and a good reminder for the folks who’ve been at it a while.

Google makes search more semantic

vdebolt — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:46:39 +0000

A few links to help you understand the latest thing coming from Google.

At TechCrunch: Google Takes Steps Toward a More Structured Web
At Burningbird: Google Searchology – Rich Snippets
At SearchEngineLand: Live Blogging Google Searchology

RDFa needs to rethink its nomenclature

vdebolt — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:12:29 +0000

RDFa has a nomenclature problem. They need to rebrand what they are calling things if they want to prevent eyes from glazing over and hearts from sinking with that “Oh, my God, I don’t have time to learn all this,” feeling that they create with their unusual terminology.

What’s all this stuff about “flavors” at the W3C? They are saying the rel=”license” attribute and value added to a link is “flavor?”

Or take a look at this tutorial. It’s a very well done tutorial, but it’s using nomenclature about subjects, predicates and objects.

Subjects and predicates. What?

After we learn all about subjects, predicates and objects, we may realize that we are talking about ELEMENTS WITH ATTRIBUTES AND VALUES! So why not call them elements, attributes, and values? Why throw in nomenclature about triples and predicates and flavors?

Compare that with the tutorials at RDFaWiki, where you see examples without all the distracting terminology.

All you RDFa people are screaming at your computers now. Yes, of course, I’m oversimplifying. So you can brush off the suggestion as too stupid and simple-minded to even consider if you want. That’s OK. I’m just saying that if you call things by familiar names like element, attribute and value, you will grab more people who are willing to spend a little time figuring out what you’re doing. Which might mean that RDFa achieves a better adoption rate.