Wordpress, TinyMCE and RDFa editors
I’m writing this in Wordpress’s ‘Visual’ mode WYSIWYG HTML editor, and thinking “how could it be improved to support RDFa?”
Well let’s think. Humm. In RDFa, every section of text is always ‘about’ something, and then has typed links or properties associated with that thing. So there are icons ‘B’ for bold, ‘I’ for italics, etc. And thingies for bulleted lists, paragraphs, fonts. I’m not sure how easily it would handle the nesting of full RDFa, but some common case could be a start: a paragraph that was about some specific thing, and within which the topical focus didn’t shift.
So, here is a paragraph about me. How to say it’s really about me? There could be a ‘typeof’ attribute on the paragraph element, with value foaf:Person, and an ‘about’ attribute with a URI for me, eg. http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf#danbri
In this UI, I just type textual paragraphs and then double newlines are interpreted by the publishing engine as separate HTML paragraphs. I don’t see any paragraph-level or even post-level properties in the user interface where an ‘about’ URI could be stored. But I’m sure something could be hacked. Now what about properties and links? Let’s see…
I’d like to link to TinyMCE now, since that is the HTML editor that is embedded in Wordpress. So here is a normal link to TinyMCE. To make it, I searched for the TinyMCE homepage, copied its URL into the copy/paste buffer, then pressed the ‘add link’ icon here after highlighting the text I wanted to turn into a link.
It gave me a little HTML/CSS popup window with some options – link URL, target window, link title and (CSS) class; I’ve posted a screenshot below. This bit of UI seems like it could be easily extended for typed links. For example, if I were adding a link to a paragraph that was about a Film, and I was linking to (a page about) its director or an actor, we might want to express that using an annotation on the link. Due to the indirection (we’re trying to say that the link is to a page whose primary topic is the director, etc.), this might complicate our markup. I’ll come back to that later.
tinymce link edit screenshop
I wonder if there’s any mention of RDFa on the TinyMCE site? Nope. Nor even any mention of Microformats.
Perhaps the simplest thing to try to build into TinyMCE would be for a situation where a type on the link expressed a relationship between the topic of the blog post (or paragraph), and some kind of document.
For example, a paragraph about me, might want to annotate a link to my old school’s homepage (ie. http://www.westergate.w-sussex.sch.uk/ ) with a rel=”foaf:schoolHomepage” property.
So our target RDFa would be something like (assuming this markup is escaped and displayed nicely):
<p about=”http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf#danbri” typeof=”foaf:Person” xmlns:foaf=”http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/”>
I’m Dan, and I went to <a rel=”foaf:schoolHomepage” href=”http://www.westergate.w-sussex.sch.uk/”>Westergate School</a>
</p>.
See recent discussion on the foaf-dev list where we contrast this idiom with one that uses a relationship (eg. ’school’) that directly links a person to a school, rather than to the school’s homepage. Toby made some example RDFa output of the latter style, in response to a debate about whether the foaf:schoolHomepage idiom is an ‘anti-pattern’. Excerpt:
<p about=”http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf#danbri” typeof=”foaf:Person” xmlns:foaf=”http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/”>
My name is <span property=”foaf:name”>Dan Brickley</span> and I spent much of the ’80s at <span rel=”foaf:school”><a typeof=”foaf:Organization” property=”foaf:name” rel=”foaf:homepage” href=”http://www.westergate.w-sussex.sch.uk/”>Westergate School</a></a>.
</p>
So there are some differences between these two idioms. From the RDF side they tell you similar things: the school I went to. The latter idiom is more expressive, and allows additional information to be expressed about the school, without mixing it up with the school’s homepage. The former simply says “this link is to the homepage of Dan’s school”; and presumably defers to the school site or elsewhere for more details.
I’m interested to learn more about how these expressivity tradeoffs relate to the possibilities for visual / graphical editors. Could TinyMCE be easily extended to support either idiom? How would the GUI recognise a markup pattern suitable for editing in either style? Can we avoid having to express relationships indirectly, ie. via pages? Would it be a big job to get some basic RDFa facilities into Wordpress via TinyMCE?
For related earlier work, see the 2003 SWAD-Europe report on Semantic blogging from the team then at HP Labs Bristol.
Syndicated 2009-12-23 16:06:18 from danbri's foaf stories