discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

Evan Prodromou wrote:
> Oh, and: obviously, this would just be one more way to encode metadata
> in HTML. It wouldn't necessarily replace the RDF, just be another way
> of doing it. Instead of having folks do <link> and <meta> tags any old
> way -- which they're probably going to end up doing, since not
> everyone loves RDF -- it'd be better to specify how to do it, so
> there's a recommendation for doing it uniformly.

Well, link tags don't avoid RDF, they just point to another URI which 
itself should contain RDF (of course link tags can point to anything, 
but for CC license metadata that would be RDF).  I added a note about 
<meta> tags to

http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/extend#html

which already included a note about <link>.

Lucas Gonze wrote:
> I basically agree with Evan.  I don't see the harm in a meta tag, and 
> not having all that verbose RDF might bring people in who wouldn't do it 
> otherwise.
>
> It would also work to have a "link rel=" element pointing to a page of 
> CC RDF, or even to have a registry of URLs released under a CC license 
> but without an embedded claim in the HTML.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.

I like 1000 blooming flowers, not necessarily 1000 different data 
formats.  But you and Evan are probably correct in that there's little 
harm in people who really want to use <meta> tags (or whatever) using 
them, and they may as well use their preferred vehicle in a 
"recommended" fashion, else you effectively have several thousand 
different data formats (given that you started with 1000). :-)

BTW, I just noticed 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2003Nov/0007.html>. 


Summary: <http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/grokCC.xsl>, <link 
rel="xslt2rdf">'d in <http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/> produces CC 
RDF by looking for a plain old <a href=...> to a CC license in HTML.  I 
find this a bit interesting -- rather than encouraging people to embed 
metadata, this general approach would work better (and thus encourage 
the process) as people build more semantic HTML, from which metadata may 
be extracted.

--
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21