What is the relationship between RDF, RDFa, Microformats and Microdata

Question

I\'ve done quite a bit of research but I can\'t understand the exact relationship between the 3. Also, now that W3C has officially recognised RDFa, would you recommend it over

Answer 1

all three are an attempt to make web content more semantic.

rdfa faced many barriers to entry; it shared the same growing pain(s) that xml (rdfa is xml based) did in the early years of the web, only probably more significant because there were less developers invovled.

i don't know enough about rdfa to recommend it over microdata. i am biased towards microdata because Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (now Bing) got together and created it. rdfa was being developed and the microformats proposal was done. moreover microformats were already in mass production and consumption on the web. so the big 3 decided to collude and came up with microdata. i'm a bit jaded, i think because i don't fundamentally understand why microformats was ditched. sounds like a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

so i recommend microformats over all. they're sooooooo easy. and so awesome. what can you achieve with the microdata that you can't with microformats?

that said....i'd pick microdata over rdfa because they are just as easy. and data-attributes are far superior to html classes. actually, maybe that's the big bonus? data-attributes? just like your bit of research, i've looked long and hard for the reasonings behind microdata but all i can find is normal, cookie-cutter posts.