On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Manu Sporny msporny@digitalbazaar.com wrote:
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Manu Sporny msporny@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@digitalbazaar.com Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:47:07 -0500 From: Manu Sporny msporny@digitalbazaar.com User-Agent: Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (X11/20090103) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Philip_J=E4genstedt?= philip@foolip.org CC: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: [OFFLIST] Re: [Wikitech-l] RDFa and Microdata in MediaWiki References: 95E5D943-BD84-4028-8FDA-8CBC7D4CE587@iki.fi 4B54E525.8020100@digitalbazaar.com fbad4e141001181524t4c0622d6i4689b32510c6f426@mail.gmail.com In-Reply-To: fbad4e141001181524t4c0622d6i4689b32510c6f426@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
David Gerard wrote:
2010/1/18 Manu Sporny msporny@digitalbazaar.com:
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/
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
(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