It's been great getting some feedback on my previous post with regards to this topic.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Daniel raises some valid points I'd like to expand upon. I'm still thinking about Jasons. And have an uneasiness about some of them

Anyway, re-reading part of i-tags, I understand that the current i-tag specification simply points to a predicate of vocabularies describing the content tagged.

I'm not very well versed on these things however what I had hoped could be achieved is the ability to include in an i-tag, an indentifier as to where an embedded objects metadata can be found. I envision this being done through say a microformat predicate class.

Here an example of me tagging myself with my hCard as metadata in my about page:

<a rel="tag" class="i-tag" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/i-tags/craig-hCard/">Craig</a>

Heres an example i-tag as I see it, at that link above:

<div class="i-tag">
  <!-- i-tag header metadata describing the i-tag itself -->
  <div>
    <a class="id" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/i-tags/craig-hCard">I-Tag</a>
    <a class="subject" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/about/">About Craig</a>
    <a class="author" href="http://depresssionisms.com/tblog/about/">Author: Craig</a>
    <a class="publisher" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/">Cataga</a>
    <a class="verifier" href="https://verify.opinity.com/">I-Tag Verifier: Opinity</a>
    <a class="date" href="http://xri.net/($d*2006-01-12T12:13:14Z)">Tag Date: 2006/03/22 08:19</a>
  </div>
  <!– i-tag body metadata describing the subject identified above–>
  <div>
    <a class="predicate" href="http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag">Tags</a>
    <div>
      <a class="object" rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/person">person</a>
      <a class="object" rel="tag" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/category/i-tags/">i-tags</a>
    </div>
  </div>
  <div>
    <a class="predicate" href="http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license">Licenses</a>
    <div>
      <a class="object" rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nd/1.0/">Creative Commons NoDerivs 1.0</a>
    </div>
  </div>

<div>
    <a class="predicate" href="http://microformats.org/</a>
    <div>
      <a class="object" rel="microformat" href="http://neuraxon77.pip.verisignlabs.com/hCard/">hCard</a>
    </div>
  </div>

</div>

The example above being my hosted hCard stored on an OpenID provider. Restricting access to that data to trusted users or sites. The ability to mark attributes in that secure data as publicly publishable or not. Like email addresses.

Instead of displaying email addresses in full view for spiders, they're replaced with a placeholder for requesting those details, the placeholder being a Yadis Identity form discovering my OpenID or i-name provider contact form. The placeholder opening say an AJAX form whereby the users name, email address, and message requesting why they want access are then transmitted to my provider, the user never having to leave my site. If I then approve the request, they get an email saying so, either with the content they requested or the original link where they were looking for it. If the link, they head to the site and on entering their email and a returned password(for email user verification) in the request information area(this, along with their details could be included in the link?), they get that information displayed. If the user has their own Yadis Identity the password wouldn't be required. To get the content they wanted, users might be encouraged to get an identity! Identity viral marketing.

Ideally, what I'm looking for is one way - a tag or identifier - to describe what the content is about on a page or section of a page and who has permission to it.

For me personally and the project I'm working on, I have the need to be able to tag an object embedded anywhere in a page, and use that tag to provide additional information on the object like licensing and privacy restrictions. Whether that be a users name, an image, part or the entire document, I want to be able to tag it on creation with the tag containing the metadata for it. Say one part of a document as copyright, another part under a creative commons license. I want to be able to distinguish those sections. An image on a page may be copyright but the text might not be.

There's a lot to learn of what's out there at the moment to do this. Right now for me it's as clear as mud. I probably should have been clearer in my previous post that I may have been thinking about i-tags outside its current scope there.

Thinking about it another way, I'm wondering if eRDF could be be used by defining my own standard rdf schema for tagging content or something. It's all very confusing at the moment because I think I'm trying to do something outside the scope of everything I'm finding. Or misunderstanding what I am. All a learning process.

Really appreciate the feedback on this though.

I raise this question after noticing bloglines display the microformats Jason used in his post, inline. Not good for human reader and probably goes against the semantic web ideal. For me that makes it worth exploring avenues other than display:none and whether it's wise to even embed microcontent at all if it's there for machines and not humans.

While I don't know how practical this is as yet, instead of embedding the microcontent it could be more seemlessly done through something like i-tags. The beauty of itags is storing of the object metadata through URI/XRI addressing. Instead of embedding the microcontent, you would embed the i-tag as a pointer to the microcontent. Giving you not only the ability to include the microcontent, but licensing and other metadata for that object in a unique location you could refer to again at anytime. The big issue with this however is spiders and scripts like Jasons viewer would have to be i-tag friendly. Additionally, doing it the i-tag way and keeping a library of trusted i-tags will allow the owners of individual microformats like hCard, to update that card at anytime and have those changes reflected on sites that link to that i-tag. This way if you change your job and work address, your hCard address is still accurate on sites its published on.

Instead of copy and pasting microformats using Live Clipboard, should we be copy and pasting the i-tags. Storing them, caching and displaying the metadata attached.

Thinking about this and now how SSE might fit in makes my head spin.

Welcome to my microcontent generation station. The race is on…

microformats

structuredblogging

eRDF

GRDDL

RDFa

Which will it be?

I've been reading about embedding microcontent into XHTML recently for a project of mine. I'm finding while there is so much to read, researching has been fun learning these technologies. So much terminology to get my head around though. To be honest I'm quite surprised there are so many out there, especially those I hadn't heard of in the mainstream. Whereas formats of the likes of microformats has technorati pushing it in the mainstream, as did structured blogging with pubsub, it's only been since delving deeper into the world of standards that I've discovered the great work of others. I love finding these community corners of the web I never knew existed and the great minds populating them.

There is certainly some interesting standards popping out of the woodwork, and while each of those listed earlier fills it's own niche, for me it's the little known eRDF that stands out for its compatiblity with microformats and future-proofing towards RDFa.

Ian Davis has done a lot of great work on eRDF. He and Benjamin are great reads. I'm enjoying learning all thats good in the semantic web world.

Today Jason Kolb has posted some interesting work. His microformats viewer. I really look forward to seeing this evolve and am curious as to what xformats.org will become.

I love the ability to lauch external apps based on the metadata such as Skype. However I wonder if perhaps Jasons viewer would fulfill more potential as a script anyone could drop into their site. I can see something like this speeding up adoption through increasing awareness. Say a microformat script that parsed and displaying a little microformat icon next to the embedded format. That on hovering the icon, the information be displayed in a bubble.

Also my suggestion to those who would implement Live Clipboard; I'd like to see cut/copy/paste/delete options appear on hovering scissors if possible. At the least a tooltip suggesting you right-click. For people like me just learning about the technology, it's confusing left-clicking on the scissors then thinking you've copied the object, only to find when you paste it into notepad that you actually haven't. Until I read Ray's Technical Instructions I didn't really understand what actually happens on selection. Seems vital to get this basic functionality right. Usability is very important if this is to become widely accepted and usable.

Will be fun seeing what pops up next.