Don’t call me DOM

The GRDDL specification was updated with a new version last Monday. While there was quite a bit of editorial work (mainly the work of DanC), there were two really impotant changes:

• the document is now a Team Submission rather than a Coordination Group Note; this was the shortest way to update the specification, given that no Working Group has clearly manifested an interest in maintaining the document at this time (see the related discussion) , but this is not necessarily the final status of the specification
• using GRDDL as a way to describe a specific HTML profile has been officially added to the specification

This last change, while it had floated in a few implementations for quite some time (e.g. in the XSLT-based demonstrators), is probably one of the most interesting capabilities for the HTML community, and especially for the HTML Microformats. Basically, it means that a GRDDL processor when encountering an HTML document with a profile attribute set to a given URI (as for instance in XFN) will get to that URI, tries to GRDDL it (so that the profile document can be in any XML language), and if it finds the appropriate description, it will apply the XSLT transformation found to the initial document.

To take a practical example with the XFN microformat, since this microformat uses a well-defined profile, if the community is interested to make all the XFN content incorporated in the Semantic Web, they just need to update the said profile to point to a relevant XSLT transformation (DanC drafted one a while ago) and any GRDDL-enabled processor would be able to parse the data.

I believe this is a pretty powerful mechanism, and I’m hoping this will indeed happen at some point; the expected benefits are not only for the RDF/XML community that would get more data to churn: it is also a very good way for the microformats community to get a common inftrastructure to parse all the microformats, without having to write specific parsers for each of these formats.

And, as an aside, it offers a common way to describe HTML profiles, and using any XML language that one sees fit…