Raw

A thought in passing. When I've need to display SPARQL results in a browser I've generally either used some kind of programmatic templating (as in this blog) or XSLT on XML results - which can get clunky, but when the transformation is done, it's done. Results XML is straightforward (and I'm still rather fond of XML) but the choice of syntax is pretty arbitrary. The RDF that comes back from a CONSTRUCT is grand, that's a really nice kind of query, the data is immediately ready for reuse (it might an obsessive-compulsive thing, but DESCRIBE still feels a bit messy). I've not got around to playing with JSON results, presumably that lends itself to speedy application in most languages.

But I can't help thinking it'd be neat if SPARQL results came back directly as RDFa so by default you had something that made sense both in a browser and to an RDF agent. Is there anything you can do with a SELECT that a CONSTRUCT-to-HTML couldn't do? Is there any way the stuff could be structured to simplify templating? There's at least one results XML to HTML XSLT around somewhere, I guess that could be tweaked for experimantation.