The DEATH of RDFa?

In their infinate wisdom, Google, Bing and Yahoo have announced a new initiative called Schema.org. The aim of Schema is to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.

Now, if you’re new to this concept, understand that the concept itself is NOT new. For years now, we have had 3 competing markup schemas:

1. Microformats
2. RDFa (Resource Description Framework – in – attributes)
3. Microdata

They each served a similar purpose. Say you’re the web designer / developer of a library website, and in your database you have thousands of books. Each book has a database entry for “title”, “author”, “publish date”, “synopsis”, etc. To any search engine, web browser, or even any shopping comparison site, its just a bundle of text, just a string of characters. It can’t tell the difference between “title” and “ISBN”, because on the page, its just…text.

Along came the idea of a data schema to be placed in and around traditional mark-up tags. Traditional markup already has the ability to say what information is IN a page, for example H1 means “Heading Level 1″, but that doesn’t give the computer reading it any idea what the information inside that H1 tag really means. Sure…its a heading, but that heading could be a book title, artists name, or simply be there because I feel Milla Jovavich is hot as hell and her name should be the biggest damn thing on the page. With a well defined schema, you could wrap the title of a book in code that tell all electronic devices reading it that “This is the title!”, and do the same for author name, author photos, reviews, etc. The when a search engine like Googlebot came along, it also could read the page and make note of what data was what…ostensibly making the web a better place. The idea being, if you were searching for “Moby Dick”, Google would have the ability to separate the book from some random post on a message board where someone thought the musician Moby was a “dick”.

Makes sense right?

So, as is usual on the internet, different people or groups had differing ideas about what should be done, and from the ensuing chaos, three overall approaches rose to the top…the ones listed above.

• Microformats started at the grassroots level…it was just a bunch of fellow nerds who wanted to have more well defined data. As such, it has no centralized managing body, nor standards, and instead is more of a living organism that is added to by the community as a whole.
• RDFa on the other hand is a recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main standards organization. It built upon the ideas of XHTML, and as such was very flexible and extensible. Microformats was less commerce friendly by its very nature, and RDFa was more commerce friendly.
• Microdata was an effort that was meant to be part of the HTML5 specifications, using many of the ideas that HTML itself already uses such as nesting. Microdata itself is an attempt to simplify what Microformats and RDFa are doing.

And along comes the Google and Yahoo announcements of Schema.org…to the expected mixed reviews.

The issue, as I see it is, the last thing we developers need is yet ANOTHER standard to develop for. Anyone who has ever had to write their CSS twice, one for IE, and then again for browsers that actually WORK, knows what a pain in the rear this can be. Sure, I bet more than a few of you out there will read this and think, “Yeah, but if Google AND Bing AND Yahoo are adopting it, wont it become the standard now?”. In a perfect world…maybe. But keep in mind we live in the same world where the browsers cant even agree on what CSS standards they will support…even when any 8 year old can walk into a local bookstore and pick up a dictionary or what CSS contains, there are still things all browsers EXCEPT Internet Explorer get right. (And dont even get me started on the adoption of CSS3 standards….ugh…)

RDFa has already been embraced by the W3C, and in Google’s own words:

“There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we’ve gone with.” – Kavi Goel and Pravir Gupta, GoogleBlog

So the big three search engines are going to play a game of chicken with the W3C, essentially telling them, “Drop RDFa and get on our bandwagon”.

So who will win?

Who cares?

We know who will lose.

Us.

The folks who have to create these pages.

“Oh” you think, “then I’ll do what I currently do for CSS, I’ll write BOTH codes! Let the chips fall where they may!”. We cant merge the two, as Goel and Gupta point out “you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers“, right after saying they will still support RDFa. Its one or the other. We’re caught between the two. The Scylla and Charybdis, the devil and the deep blue sea.

And because the only thing bigger than Google, Bing and Yahoo combined in God himself, we will once again be forced to listen to them rather than logic.

(Then again, Facebook uses OGP, which is based on RDFa, and now that Zuckerberg is only eating meat that he kills with his own hands maybe he will take Bing-Yahoo-Google and give them a big wet slap and make them adopt RDFa….. nahhhhhhh!)

Related articles

• Schema.org, Google +1 and Facebook Like and Send (ukwebfocus.wordpress.com)
• Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com)
• Why RDFa is the only Web scaleable metadata format for next-generation search engines (blogs.sitepoint.com)