Death of XHTML 2 makes future of RDFa an "open question"

Upon reading that the World Wide Web Consortium has decided to stop work on XHTML 2, I wondered what that means for RDFa.

On July 2, the standards body announced that it will let its XHTML 2 Working Group’s charter expire at the end of this year. The move will allow the W3C to increase the resources it devotes to the development of HTML 5.

XHTML 2, which was in its eighth public working draft, attracted criticism for, among other things, not being backward compatible with previous versions of Hypertext Markup Language. HTML 5, however, is backward compatible.

RDFa, a key Semantic Web technology, came out of the work of the XHTML 2 Working Group. Last fall, RDFa in XHTML became a W3C recommendation.

With its announcement, the W3C posted an FAQ that addresses some questions about the future of Extensible Hypertext Markup Language.

Regarding RDFa, the FAQ states:

RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. W3C published RDFa as a Recommendation in October 2008, and deployment continues to grow.

The HTML Working Group has not yet incorporated RDFa into their drafts of HTML 5. Whether and how to include RDFa into HTML 5 is an open question on which we expect further discussion from the community (see also the question on decentralized extensibility).

It looks like the future of RDFa is up in the air—at least as far as its use in HTML goes.

You can follow Stephen Hui on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenhui.