Predefined class names have been dropped now, but without @profile (or something like it), class names are still predefined by whoever is shouting the loudest.
We don't need a common vocabulary of class names decided by democracy or autocracy. We just need a standard mechanism that lets people solve their own data-in-html problems and tell user-agents how they are doing it without getting in anyone else's way. @profile is the closest we've got to that.
How well-trodden do cow-paths have to be before they are recognised as such?
According to Ian Hickson's reporting of the Google study [1]: "It turns out that a tiny but measurable number of people do use the profile attribute, though."
If we were to adopt a more thorough empirical approach, we might want to consider some possibly confounding factors stemming from the limitations of the age and coverage of the Google dataset and also whether we should be taking account of rates of change.
Only content served as "text/html" was used in the study. Probably more than any other attribute, @profile use will be vulnerable to under-reporting if content served as application/xhtml+xml is excluded from the dataset.
The study was performed in December 2005. From a methodological perspective, I'd want to adopt a /much/ more circumspect approach to @profile usage stats based on an 18-month old study. That's a serious chunk of time w.r.t. the Net, long enough for things to change significantly, especially when one considers the amount of attention and promotion that SemWeb tech has received since then.
No mention was made of the 70% -odd of the Net that Google /doesn't/ index, the "dark web" (that figure is taken from a recent ACM article [2]). "Dark web" content is mostly served via query interfaces and it's a moot point whether this domain might exhibit a different level of @profile tag usage to that part of the Net which /has/ been indexed by Google.
[1] http://code.google.com/webstats/...tats/ index.html
[2] http://portal.acm.org/ citation.c...1230819.1241670
2007-05-18EDT21:42:07+00:00
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According to Ian Hickson's reporting of the Google study [1]: "It turns out that a tiny but measurable number of people do use the profile attribute, though."
If we were to adopt a more thorough empirical approach, we might want to consider some possibly confounding factors stemming from the limitations of the age and coverage of the Google dataset and also whether we should be taking account of rates of change.
Only content served as "text/html" was used in the study. Probably more than any other attribute, @profile use will be vulnerable to under-reporting if content served as application/xhtml+xml is excluded from the dataset.
The study was performed in December 2005. From a methodological perspective, I'd want to adopt a /much/ more circumspect approach to @profile usage stats based on an 18-month old study. That's a serious chunk of time w.r.t. the Net, long enough for things to change significantly, especially when one considers the amount of attention and promotion that SemWeb tech has received since then.
No mention was made of the 70% -odd of the Net that Google /doesn't/ index, the "dark web" (that figure is taken from a recent ACM article [2]). "Dark web" content is mostly served via query interfaces and it's a moot point whether this domain might exhibit a different level of @profile tag usage to that part of the Net which /has/ been indexed by Google.
[1] http://code.google.com/webstats/...tats/ index.html
[2] http://portal.acm.org/ citation.c...1230819.1241670
