Enhanced Metadata Graduates from Labs

Nathan Yergler, June 21st, 2007

Early this morning we launched some functionality on the main “license chooser”:http://creativecommons.org/license previously available only on “Labs”:http://labs.creativecommons.org. As many (ok, at least a few) people have noted, we previously stopped embedding RDF in the HTML generated by the chooser. As we’ve “noted”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Extend_Metadata#Embedding_RDF_in_HTML in the past, RDF in a comment has several draw backs, not the least of which is that it’s opaque to parsers. The new update to the license chooser restores the embedded metadata using “RDFa”:http://rdfa.info.

As the name implies, RDFa is a way of expressing RDF using _attributes_ in the HTML. This is similar to microformats, but different in that any RDFa parser can read any RDFa information — no special knowledge required. So the new metadata once again allows you to encode the name of your work, your name, and the type of work, all in the HTML. A full example (with all fields filled in) is shown here:

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So how do you know the metadata is there? Check out the “RDFa Bookmarklets”:http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/impl/js/ which demonstrate how you can expose the information using some simple Javascript.

*UPDATE* Unfortunately WordPress MU strips out attributes it doesn’t recognize, so the example above isn’t as complete as it could be.