RDF and microdata future

Question

What should we expect from RDF and microdata in the future? Is microdata able to completely replace RDF, is this the goal? Or are they meant to exist side by side? Should we

Answer 1

The question is about a kind of format war in the 2013's... Who will win the war in the future? The future is now :-)

Today, the statistical big picture is "Microdata is winning".

About "the best format", when thinking that "better is what the user need"... Again statistics. The only good answer was develped over time (years) as adoption rates.

Use Microdata because ~75% was using in 2016

It is not a standard (in the far future W3C/TR/microdata perhaps will be), there are no "real good reason" to use Microdata... Except that the majority is using it... There are a reliable statistics (nobody was opposing this work using WebDataCommons)

• Microdata: ~2.5 million of domains, 900 million of URLs.
• RDFa: ~0.9 million of domains, 312 million of URLs.

So Microdate was used in 2016 by ~2.5 times more domains and 3 times more URLs... And there are no "new fact" to revert the growing of Microdata adoption.

Imagining "all users" as RDFa+Microdata (2.5+0.9=3.4), we can say that ~75% of all users (2.5/3.4) are using Microdata.

Source: http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/#results-2016-1

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See also:

• (avoid meta and JSON-LD) https://stackoverflow.com/a/43960968
• Statistics about "Microformat vs HTML+RDFa" adoption
• ...