Structured data on the Web and AXEL
Stephane
There are some moves on the Web that could encourage Web site owners to structure data. There is a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages [1]. The intended benefit is that web sites with structured data will be distinguished in search results with rich snippets.
This initiative is documented at http://schema.org/
This may be a chance for AXEL, as from the origin the XTiger templating language has been designed in order to produce Microformats and semantic XHTML [2]. Although XTiger XML which is implemented in AXEL diverges a little from XTiger, it is quite possible too to create templates generating semantic XHTML from AXEL. This is the case for instance of the slide show demonstration announced on this mailing list [3], or of a new "Specification.xhtml" template [4] that I commited recently and which is used to directly edit the XTiger XML specification (an XHTML document) [4].
These last two experiences have led me to open an Issue in AXEL developement [5] whose purpose is to facilitate the creation of templates that directly generate semantic XHTML content (or HTML5 with micro data). As you can see in the Issue comments, some have even suggested to take inspiration into the HAML templating language in Rails [6] to extend XTiger XML "label" attribute syntax.
I wanted to share these ideas, just in case some of you would like to comment. In all the cases, the purpose of AXEL / XTiger XML is to edit any XML target content models. Producing semantic XHTML (or HTML5 with micro data) is just an option, but I believe that if schema.org initiative take off, this may attract developers to AXEL since as far as I know current rich text editors will be quite limited in enabling structured data editing compared to template-driven approaches.
Stéphane
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[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html
[2] Templates, Microformats and Structured Editing, Francesc Campoy Flores, Vincent Quint, Irène Vatton, Microformats and semantic XHTML, http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00193958/fr/
[3] http://groups.google.com/group/axel-dev/browse_thread/thread/34e5cb675cb97ab5
[4] https://github.com/ssire/axel/blob/master/templates/Specification.xhtml
[5] https://github.com/ssire/axel/issues/11
[6] http://haml-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.HAML_REFERENCE.html