Reviving Structured Content on the Web
Since the 1990s there have been many efforts to standardize the way we describe types of information using XML, such as mathematical symbols and MathML. While these definitions prove useful for many applications, their usefulness failed to translate to the Web. There are several reasons for the failure. Web applications often fail to deliver content, retaining the structure found implicitly in XML repositories and databases. Rather, Web applications typically take this structured data and transform it into unstructured HTML. Also, Web applications that deliver content retaining its structure rely on browsers having explicit knowledge of how to display it. For example, for MathML to properly display in a Web browser, it must have a plug-in. Today, given the popularity of XML-based, Web-friendly grammars, such as XHTML and RSS, a new movement is afoot to deliver on the original promise of XML and structured information for the Web.
Several communities are working to take advantage of metadata by providing tools to create and syndicate structured information in machine-readable formats, which empowers other applications to understand it. For example, microformats and structured blogging present simple, open data formats built on existing and adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works, they intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns. This presentation will provide an overview of emerging trends for microformats, structured blogging and RDF/RDFa; describe some of the common data types that are inherently structure-able, such as events/calendars, reviews, recipes, directions and contact information; and look at the benefit of their real-world application in Web content management systems, XML authoring tools, syndication and blogs.