WebDescriptionProposals

Proposed WebDescription formats, with brief summaries if they have a particular niche or history, in rough chronological order.

Please restrict to generic formats; formats that describe specific patterns of use should be listed on WebDescriptionExamples. Discussion of these formats should be on separate pages; link to them with a (discuss Format'Name) link.

WIDL Submitted to W3C 22 September 1997
URISpace February 2001 -- configuration-focused, generic format. Loosely based on RDF.
WRDL circa Aug 2002
WADL by Marc Hadley on April 24, 2006 - this version supercedes previous versions. presentation at XML2005 Newer versions
RDF Forms
NSDL
WebDesc -- very rough, just example and tools.
WDL
WAIF
Google Sitemaps gives me that 'one of these things is not like the others' feeling -- squint harder 8-)
XForms
HTML forms
Web Forms 2.0
OpenSearch

We've got proposals that use XML and RDF/XML for the syntax; are there any microformats for generically describe Web applications out there? -- MarkNottingham

HTML forms or Web Forms 2.0 is probably the closest thing to the spirit of microformatted service description. -- MarkBaker

I'm experimenting with WAIF in embedded RDF which would effectively be an XHTML microformat for service description. -- IanDavis

See also (should be moved to WebDescriptionExamples?) :

SparqlEndpointDescription
SADDLE SPARQL Service Advertisement and Discovery Language