That speech certainly stirred things up. Jeez, I should speak more often. I learn a lot from the indignant responses. And speaking of indignant responses, not only are there Danny Ayer’s excellent rebuttals, there is a classic from Marc Cantor. I love this response. It is thoughtful, but passionate, indignant, and totally interesting. And yet, I don’t agree with it. If his article is to believed, only through the aegis of RDF can I understand the “micro content” like who authored a talk, what was it about, what was covered. Now it is undoubtedly true, that if I build a ton of RDF that, through the right assertions, it could say who authored the content, what it was about, and so on. Of course, I could also just invent some namespace and add some attributes to do this. (I can see Marc getting red in the face just thinking about the ignorance and stupidity of this remark). But seriously, I know how to add attributes and elements. It is easy. Even I can do it. But I always get confused when I try to even remember the RDF syntax for somehow asserting who the author is. And, apparently, so do others. I’m Ok with the looser less precise intelligence of Google in searching the text to answer these questions. And no Mark, it isn’t because “Google is known as an anti-meta-data sort of place”. I’ve only been there 5 months for goodness sakes. It is because it works pretty well. However, I’m still learning and this argument I think benefits everyone, even if I turn out ot be wrong, because it gets people thinking.
Several people have complained that I was unfair to CSS. I didn’t mean to say that people should never use CSS. I use it in this Blog. It is a good thing. I like CSS. What I did mean is that when just trying to create a table with 2 cells on the left and one on the right, I don’t want to figure out the CSS for that. And, asking around, neither do a lot of other people. Mostly, I was just being amused that people try to be pixel precise in HTML when that wasn’t the original intent.
Still trying to be a 21st century kind of person.
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