EuroFoo

I'm in Brussels at the moment after attending EuroFoo over the weekend. As a format Foo and Bar camps rock: people talk about what they want when they want (well, in fixed timeslots, anyway) and the sessions are usually small enough for audience participation. I talked a little about Postgenomic and discovered that I suck at Pecha Kucha (tm) in the process. The valuable lesson learned was to always rehearse your presentation out loud at least once to get the timings down.

I had an interesting discussion about microformats vs "proper" semantic markup in the form of RDFa (see also the RDFa primer).

Here's a simple example of RDFa in action (from this presentation):

Normal link:

<a href="http://cc.org/licenses/by/2.5/">Creative Commons License.</a>

With RDFa:

<a xmlns:cc="http://cc.org/ns#" rel="cc:license" href="http://cc.org/licenses/by/2.5/"> Creative Commons License</a>

If you're into semantic markup and haven't already, check out the spec.

Anyway, the problem that RDFa has is that microformats are already out there (at Yahoo!, Techhnorati and lots of blogs) - and broadly speaking they work, despite their limitations. I think that it'll all come down to the tools: the first group that gets a WYSIWYG "add an address" or "add a review" button built into Wordpress, Moveable Type and Dreamweaver will win.

Without tools it seems to me like RDFa has a distinct disadvantage: it's easy to remember to add 'hCard' to a div to start marking up your contact details... would you remember to add xmlns:v="http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0#"?