On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny(a)digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan
18, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny(a)digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
Looks like I've had my hand slapped twice
during this discussions. I
thought this was the first warning, but David seems to think
differently. That means that either I've been too aggressive or David is
not familiar with the level of intensity surrounding the Microdata/RDFa
debates.
That veiled insults and questioning others' motives is par for the
course on public-html doesn't mean we're going to tolerate it here.
It shouldn't happen there either, of course, but we can't help that.
I strongly disagree with the idea of getting
Microdata integrated with Wikipedia at this stage, before REC
This is just not a reasonable position to take outside the ivory tower
of standards-making.
Aryeh, you're quoting something that I purposefully said off-list in an
attempt to save this mailing list from the RDFa/Microdata tumult.
It was an e-mail that I specifically sent to you, Henri, Philip and
David Gerard. That e-mail, which contained a heart-felt apology (in case
I had come across as too aggressive) has now been openly quoted out of
context. I say this because that e-mail was specifically off-list and
thus nobody on the list could discover the full context of the
statements above. The off-list e-mail is attached below in order to
further explain why I won't be participating in this discussion.
Here are the sequence of events that lead us to this point:
* Aryeh Gregor posts a call to integrate Microdata into Mediawiki[1].
* Manu Sporny, noticing a number of factual errors, responds[2] to the
initial e-mail. The focus of the arguments are around the
non-maturity of both the Microdata and HTML5+RDFa proposals.
* A number of e-mails are exchanged during which Manu Sporny is warned
to not use the term FUD or other charged language by David Gerard.
* Manu Sporny, concerned that the debate is damaging both of the
Microdata and RDFa initiatives, decides to apologize and discuss the
issue off-list with the respondents.
* Aryeh Gregor quotes portions of the off-list discussion, out of
context, and responds[3] directly to the mailing list.
* Manu Sporny responds with this e-mail.
[
1]http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-January/046382.html
[
2]http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-January/046386.html
[
3]http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-January/046466.html
I will be responding shortly to the remaining questions that have been
unanswered during this discussion and then leaving the discussion
entirely. I don't feel that we are having a productive discussion here
and the damage that I fear is resulting is the rejection of both
Microdata and RDFa.
If there are any further questions related to RDFa, please ask them on
the RDFa Task Force mailing list (a public mailing list) and we will do
the best that we can to answer them:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/
Below is the off-list e-mail that I sent to Aryeh, Philip, Henri and David.
--------------------------------
Message-ID: <4B55010B.6090607(a)digitalbazaar.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:47:07 -0500
From: Manu Sporny <msporny(a)digitalbazaar.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (X11/20090103)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen(a)iki.fi>fi>,
Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>om>,
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Philip_J=E4genstedt?= <philip(a)foolip.org>
CC: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
Subject: [OFFLIST] Re: [Wikitech-l] RDFa and Microdata in MediaWiki
References: <95E5D943-BD84-4028-8FDA-8CBC7D4CE587(a)iki.fi>
<4B54E525.8020100(a)digitalbazaar.com>
<fbad4e141001181524t4c0622d6i4689b32510c6f426(a)mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <fbad4e141001181524t4c0622d6i4689b32510c6f426(a)mail.gmail.com>
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David Gerard wrote:
2010/1/18 Manu Sporny
<msporny(a)digitalbazaar.com>om>:
Rather than argue the same FUD for Microdata,
which anybody could, I
This is FUD. You are asserting your opinion without making any sort
of
Please don't do this sort of thing. You were asked once already not
do.
Hey Aryeh, Henri, Philip,
Looks like I've had my hand slapped twice during this discussions. I
thought this was the first warning, but David seems to think
differently. That means that either I've been too aggressive or David is
not familiar with the level of intensity surrounding the Microdata/RDFa
debates. Both of these are negative outcomes in my mind.
In the first case, know that I am not, nor ever intend to personally
attack any of you. I strongly disagree with the idea of getting
Microdata integrated with Wikipedia at this stage, before REC, but it is
the idea that I am attacking, not any of you.
If any of you took any of my statements personally, specifically Aryeh
or Henri, I whole-heartedly apologize. I know each of you are doing what
you feel is best for the future of the Web, just as I am.
In the second case, if David feels the need to reel the discussion in,
that probably means that others in the community are not reacting well
to the discussion either. This is bad for both Microdata and RDFa as it
sours those that are involved to using either solution.
I think I've made the points that I wanted to make and then some, so,
I'm going to back off on replying to most of the discussion. I'll chime
in when somebody asks a direct question of me, but will eventually exit
the discussion entirely. Please do your best to fact check what you guys
are saying and be careful of how you phrase assertions about the past
and future RDFa work - things are never as clear cut as they may seem.
I hope this e-mail finds all of you in good health,
-- manu
PS: Tell Lachy that I hope his arm feels better soon. :)
--
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Monarch - Next Generation REST Web Services
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/12/14/monarch/
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(Sorry for the double-posting, wanted to make sure this
got in the correct thread)
At this point, all I see is a discussion between two technologies that are
about equally difficult to implement for MediaWiki, provide roughly the
same benefits, varying largely in the semantics of how it's presented. In
any case, I'm inclined to agree with Happy-Melon on this issue, and I think
we're going about it in the wrong way.
If we've got access to this metadata, then sure, it should be distributed in
as many formats as people show a desire to consume. This could be RDFa,
Microdata, or anything. Right now though, we do not have this metadata.
All we have is templates. Trying to extract this data from templates (or
by extension, parser/tag functions) is approaching the problem from the wrong
direction. It still relies on input of wikitext into the edit form. We need to
remember that wikitext is a markup language designed with presentation
in mind, not semantic data. This sort of page metadata (licenses, categories,
etc) needs to be kept out of the edit page entirely.
-Chad