Philip wrote:
Certainly, but if wiki editors are *able* to do it by hand, then IMHO microdata is much less error-prone.
Manu Sporny wrote:
I don't think that the best approach for Wikipedia is to allow direct Microdata or RDFa markup. There are already many templates in use at Wikipedia via Infobox - those templates could be leveraged to automatically generate RDFa in the same way that dbpedia.org uses those templates to generate RDF. The risk this community runs by allowing arbitrary semantic data markup is that contributors make mistakes causing half of the semantic data to be corrupted - making the rest of the data useless.
Both of you seem to think that wikipedia editors would start placing RDF/Microdata interleaved with wiki markup. I don't think that could ever happen. The "direct markup" would be inserted into infoboxes (which are themselves wikitext, although they can get quite complex).
Perhaps we shouldn't provide the full power of RDF or Microdata yet, and provide instead a extension able to handle a subset, using one or another.
(long text about if wikipedia XHTML is served as application/xml+xhtml and why it doesn't matter)
Besides, the Wikipedia community has done a fantastic job of generating valid XHTML:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus&... http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walyunga_Nati... http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishida_Shune...
The migration to XHTML+RDFa would only require the DOCTYPE to change... which shouldn't be any more difficult than transitioning to HTML5 (or HTML5+RDFa) in the future.
It's expected to provide good xhtml (the output is being passed by tidy), but nonetheless it sometimes still fail. And there're IE users, too. There is also a switch on MediaWiki for using HTML5 instead of XHTML.