RDFa Vs. Microdata

Question

RDFa in XHTML is a w3c standard. Microdata is mentioned as a HTML 5 API. My questions are:

1. Is microdata also a w3c standard? If yes, why we need 2 similar standards?

2. People say using microdata is simpler than RDFa. Except for this, what are the main differences between these two?

Thank you in advance Manoj

Answer 1

1. Yes, Microdata is also a W3C standard: HTML Microdata. There are two standards because RDFa was designed to address the requirements of the RDF community, and the WHATWG HTML5 editor found the living RDFa spec too advanced, so designed his own thing.

2. This is a very subjective question, but I'd say the advantages of RDFa are: it makes it easier to combine multiple vocabularies/schemas, it has better support for datatypes and the like, and is compatible with all the other RDF-based standards in case you care about that. The advantage of Microdata is that it's simpler to grasp for HTML authors. Here's a big comparison of both formats (done by and RDFa guy, so perhaps a bit biased).