* Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> [Thu, 21 Jan 2010
18:55:38 -0500]:
Okay, I'll grant that for an RDF-style use-case,
parser functions are
a better bet than the alternatives. However, I'm not sure that's the
case for inline markup, in the limited cases where we want that (e.g.,
image licenses). The problem here is that you'd have to associate the
metadata with particular phrases. You can't say
{{#prop:license|CC-BY-SA-2.0}} and output that as proper
microdata/RDFa -- or rather you could, but only by creating empty
content nodes someplace. I guess that would work . . . it's not good
practice if you're hand-authoring, and it would take a bit more space,
but it might indeed make sense from our POV.
To output the magic word / parser
function as a properly defined
metadata, one has to define the type of "license" (associate with
"vocabulary" which has proper xmlns) in the source of definition page in
NS_PROPERTY namespace, which has address [[Property:license]]. On the
Property:License page there will be a mapping of "CC-BY-SA-2.0" string
to "expanded xmlized value".
But then there's the question of writing it. The
code for raw
microdata/RDFa output is already written, and is pretty trivial
besides. Is anyone willing to write core code to do this metadata
abstraction with a parser function, and output in appropriate formats?
If not, the choice is microdata, RDFa, or nothing.
Experts in Parser probably can do that fast enough, however him / they
might be busy with more important jobs.
Not for search engines. They're spidering all the
pages anyway, so
it's easier for them to not retrieve a separate page. Besides, how
would they know how to find the metadata if it's not included or
pointed to on the page in some standard format?
Duesentrieb pointed out that
MediaWiki built-in search can benefit from
that, as well. Both metadata generation for the external engines and
internal storage (similar to SMW) could be implemented. However, it's
much simplier to perform metadata generation without the storage backend
(less optimization, scalability issues, code review). This way the goal
can be achieved in incremental steps. SMW can be adapted to use such
syntax, then it can be used to retrieve the data from Wikipedia dumps,
by installing the SMW at external, less-trusted server (toolserver?),
where the code review is not so critically important.
Dmitriy