An updated (and customizable) comparison of the different approaches for semantically enhancing HTML.
Update (2006-02-13):
In order to avoid further flame wars with RDFa folks, I've adjusted the form to not show my personal priorities as default settings anymore (here they are if you are interested, it's a 48-42-40 ranking for MFs, eRDF, and RDFa respectively). All features are set to "Nice to have" now. As you can see, for these settings, RDFa gets the highest ranking (I *said* the comparison is not biased against RDFa!). If you disable the features related to domain-independent resource descriptions, MFs shine, if you insist on HTML validity, eRDF moves up, etc. It's all in the mix.
After a
comment of mine on the Microformats IRC channel,
SWD's
Michael Hausenblas asks for the reason why I said that I personally don't like RDFa. Damn public logs ;) OK, now I have to justify that somehow without falling into rant mode again...
I already wrote
a little comparison of
Microformats,
Structured Blogging,
eRDF, and
RDFa some time ago, sounds like a good opportunity to see how things evolved during the last 8 months. Back then I concluded that both eRDF and RDFa were preferred candidates for
SemSol, but that RDFa lacked the necessary deployment potential due to not being valid HTML (as far as any widespread HTML spec is concerned).
I excluded the Structured Blogging initiative from this comparison, it seems to have died a silent death. (Their approach to redundantly embed microcontent in script tags apparently didn't convince the developer community.) I also excluded features which are equally available in all approaches, such as visible metadata, general support for plain literals, being well-formed, no negative effect on browser behaviour, etc.
Pretending to be constructive, and in order to make things less biased, I embedded a dynamic page item that allows you to create your own, tailored comparison.
The default results reflect my personal requirements (and hopefully answer Michael's question). As your mileage does most probably vary, you can just tweak the feature priorities (The different results are not stored, but the custom comparisons can be bookmarked). Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like me to add more criteria.
Bottom line: For many requirement combinations a single solution alone is not enough. My tailored summary suggests for example that I should be fine with a combination of Microformats and eRDF. How does your preferred solution mix look like?
