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_Nat…
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishida_Shun…
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.