Question

I ve been working to apply the hCalendar microformat to the events displayed on my web site. However, from my research, I get the impression that microformats are not recommended (or at least looked down upon by some). Instead, RDF seems to be the preferred way for representing semantic-rich information.

However, I m confounded by RDF. I don t even know where to start. Microformats provide an easy to understand guide for using the hCalendar format. RDF, on the other hand, is written using moon people language.

Is there an RDF alternative to hCalendar? Is there some resource that describes how to implement it? Should I just continue with hCalendar since it s easy to implement?

Answer 1

Simple google search brought up a spec written in that moonlanguage, which includes a draft XSL from hCalendar to RDF calendar. The moonlanguage therein seems actually pretty reasonable for that moonlanguage, so I suggest that you become fluent in it.

The major problem that most people have, is that RDF is just so damn weird. So, here s a three rule primer.

RDF documents describe a graph, which describe stuff.
All the arrows/nodes are described in terms of "triples", which are "subject, predicate, object", (e.g. "Ball" "HasColor" "Red")
Everything is described in terms of URIs. (e.g. <http://d8uv.org/about/id> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/mbox> <mailto:d8uv@d8uv.org>

With that in your arsenal, then it should be much easier to pull sense from the moonlanguage. Note that I m not saying "easy", because, again, RDF is damn weird.

My personal advise is to just forget the whole notion, and stick with microformats. They re semantic enough, and won t drive you to insanity. (The type of insanity that leads people to make things like RDF/XML)

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