Scott Davis makes a case for metadata or semantic data, pointing out that it is currently used by major websites to improve their traffic or the rank of the pages searched. He is presenting the most common ways to add metadata to a document: RDFa and microformats.
The world of RESTful resources that Rails firmly entered with version 1.2 naturally uses XML as its lingua franca. But there's no reason that it can't be multi-lingual, and thanks to the versatility of rails it's easy to support other standards alongside XML in our RESTful applications, potentially opening them up to a wider audience and/or reducing their bandwidth requirements.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages content.
Stu Charlton presented this week a keynote at the WWW 2011 workshop for RESTful design trying to answer the question: "Can the write side of the Web scale and become nearly as serendipitous as the read side?"
As more social networking sites are popping up, the questions around the data they keep are rising. Data portability has become the watch phrase across the Web 2.0 world. Is there something to be learned about data access and portability from these services?
The Mozilla project has released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). New features in Firefox 3 include support for Javascript 1.8, DOM and HTML changes, microformats support, and an extended Canvass implementation.
James Simmons posted on the Semantic Focus blog and Johannes la Poutré on the Squio blog had a web discussion on the differentiation between Microformats and RDF as they relate to the semantic web. While they both agree that RDF and Microformats are very different, they have a very different take on how that impacts their respective relevance to the semantic web.
