On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 6:46 PM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Is what Google is doing any sort of standard, though?
One worth adding?
[[RDFa]] is a standard. It isn't one we currently use. It would be
possible to use it if we didn't care about validating using any
validator I know of. (I believe HTML 5+RDFa has been specified by
someone, but it's not part of HTML 5 itself, and HTML 5 validators
will reject it.) HTML 5 has its own microdata syntax, but it was very
recently invented, it's controversial, I'm not sure anyone supports
it, and I'm not sure it's stable.
I'm pretty sure <link rel=license> on the image page should work fine
for everyone. It's part of HTML 5
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/history.html#link-type-license>,
and I think it predates HTML 5. Note, though, that it's very vague
about what exactly the license info applies to. I don't know if
anyone would be able to usefully figure out which parts of the page
the license applies without special-casing MediaWiki, or worse yet,
Wikipedia.
There have been proposals to allow more specific license metadata to
be supported by HTML 5, but they've been rejected in the past. I'd
have to review the discussions to recall exactly why the above wasn't
viewed as a good enough use-case.