There's a whole load of discussion going on over the BBC Microformats drama. Mark Birbeck is using it as a "Huzzah! RDFa for the fucking win!" moment, and John Resig is telling us RDF-heads that we're being unpragmatic and making things too complex (life is simple, after all, and can be represented in a finite number of elements).
I'm not going to get into a religious war about this (contrary to popular belief, epistemology gets me more steamed up and fervent than any microformats-RDF squabbles!): I'm not a huge fan of RDFa - I prefer people follow the same kind of design that microformats has done, but using GRDDL to decentralise microformat development. RDFa aside, I think that the current class-based proposal is the least bad solution - and has some potentially interesting effects, even if it is has some in-built ugliness.
We discussed this all at some length yesterday on #swig - see logs. Basically the class-based proposal is to take data that broadly follows xsd:token, stick "data-" before it and make it into a class name. The XPath to get that out will just be... beautiful.
One of the things that having a decent date-time format in HTML will allow is people to construct documents with different dates for different sections. Imagine an HTML document which contained a quote - either inline or block-level - from some historic source. Being able to tag that particular passage up as having a different author, source and date seems like a very cool thing to be able to do.
I think that Frances Berriman and the microformats community will get their heads around the date-time accessibility problem soon enough. It is a tough problem, and it is something that we need to get right. For those of us who have reached RDF Enlightenment, HTML seems very ugly - but just shouting "Use RDFa!" is not a useful way to help. There is a reason why people use document formats, and one of the challenges of the Semantic Web is coming up with a plurality of different ways of creating semantics that transcend document and data formats. Date-time stamps are just one example of this problem.
The Semantic Web is going to be messy - and that is exactly the thing people don't get. It's going to be RDF, it's going to be more XML formats than you can shake a stick at, and more microformats than you can imagine, with people forking those formats, and forking the parsers. It's the Web, remember. The Web is messy. The Semantic Web people don't deny that - but our detractors seem to think we do.
This entry has had the unproductive (if, for the author, utterly hilarious) snark reduced to trace levels for your convenience.
