Simon Willison’s Weblog

[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for. Hixie’s proposal for microdata, a simplified RDFa to be included in the HTML5 spec which allows self-contained communities to invent their own microformat-style spec and use it to add structured semantics to their markup. Whether or not you like the proposal itself the explanation is a fascinating read.

# 11th May 2009, 2:41 pm / html5, ian-hickson, markup, microdata, microformats, rdf, rdfa, semantics, whatwg

Crowbar. Headless Gecko/XULRunner which exposes a web service API for screen scraping using a real browser DOM—just pass it the URL of a page and the URL of a screen scraping JavaScript script (a bit like a Greasemonkey user script) and get back RDF/XML.

# 24th January 2009, 11:52 pm / crowbar, dom, gecko, greasemonkey, mozilla, rdf, screenscraping, webservice, xml, xulrunner

Triplr. Ultra simple GET-based web service for converting RSS / Atom / RDF / Microformats+GRDDL to HTML / ntriples / RDF / RSS / JSON / Turtle. Small pieces, loosely joined.

# 30th March 2007, 3:30 pm / atom, grddl, html, json, microformats, ntriples, rdf, rss, semanticweb, triplr, turtle

Introducing RDFa. A way of representing RDF triples in XML that doesn’t suck.

# 15th February 2007, 12:22 am / rdf, rdfa, xml