We have two standards running parallel with each other; (X)HTML is

the de facto standard for document markup, accounting for millions

of items on the web. RDF is a standard for expressing metadata,

which in turn provides a foundation for making use of that

metadata, such as reasoning about it. Yet the former is very rarely

the subject of the latter; meta information placed in the HTML

family of documents is often encoded in such a way as to make it

difficult to extract by RDF-related parsers. And if it cannot be

extracted, then it cannot be used.

RDF is about statements and triples. There are a number of syntaxes

which can be used to express these triples, such as N3 and RDF/XML.

However, there are a number of problems with incorporating any of

these syntaxes into XHTML, including validation issues, ease of

authoring and therefore HTML community acceptance, and browser

support.

This paper describes a new (1 March) meta-data module for XHTML2 that makes

it easy for processors to extract metadata as RDF triples, but

without putting an unnecessary burden on authors familiar with

HTML.

While RDF/XHTML has been specifically designed for use in XHTML2,

it is easy to apply to any XML markup.