When RDF first came along, ten years ago, the proposal was that you could publish seperate, machine-readable metadata for your web page and link to it from the head, using a link tag. Remember how we all rushed out and created RDF metadata files for our pages? Me neither. That precedent makes me very nervous about putting your machine-readable data in a seperate file — in all likelihood, it will be forgotten about and won’t get updated when the site changes. Hence the aversion to hidden metadata in the microformats community.

One point about embedding the metadata directly in the HTML — if you have access to add a link tag, surely that means you can add class=”dc_title” (microformats-style) or property=”DC.Title” (RDFa-style) to the appropriate HTML tag? This approach being much more robust against changes in the surrounding HTML and easier to maintain going forward.

I do agree that with the majority of museums seeing digitisation as publishing their records in HTML, there needs to be a mechanism of some sort to embed catalogue data in HTML. And it needs to be a mechanism with low enough barrier to entry that it doesn’t require huge technical skills to set up.