Using Markup to embed the different aspects of a specification

Spezzle uses RDFa mark-up to embed information about the implementation and documentation of a feature set. This allows us to:

• Hide information when it is not relevant (e.g. implementation details from end-users).
• Bring the different types of information (e.g. description, development, implementation, documentation) about a feature closer together so it becomes possible to use only 1 paragraph or a snippet of text to describe a feature and still also copy over the underlaying metadata.
• Do some cool things with the information, like ticket export, etc.

RDFa or "Resource Description Framework - in - attributes" is a set of extensions to XHTML that allows you to add metadata into a document. It is similar in purpose to microformats but unlike microformats it allows you to define your own set of properties that can be used to add semantic markup to a document. This is exactly what we are doing for Spezzle: we are building out set of properties for the implementation of rich specifications.

There is an extensive technical explanation of RDFa over at Wikipedia