On 14 October 2011 09:10, Neil Kandalgaonkar neilk@wikimedia.org wrote:
I didn't ask, but perhaps I could find out. It's an interesting idea, although to some degree it's once again postponing the necessary IMO work of putting licenses in the database. I mean, Commons regards correct licensing as one of the most important activities, and yet licenses aren't a real object in the system. It's very difficult to gather even basic information about how licenses are used on Commons.
Anyway as far as I can tell, microformats are dead. However, HTML5 microdata is on its way.
http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/
A Google employee wrote that spec, but that's not a guarantee it will actually work with anything, or that Google Image Search has any idea he wrote it. ;)
Eurgh. We don't really want to get into the RDFa/microformats/microdata holy wars... :-)
Frankly, given the movement's mission and commitments, using RDFa seems most sensible. Though I agree with Neil that having licences as a first-level object would be nice-to-have, the templates give us the ability to achieve proper machine-readable licence-tagging right now (well, technically they'd apply to the page not the image, but Google could easily code around that, or in a pinch we could have an extension that extracted the RDFa attributes and applied them to the IMG and A elements).
Yours,