Metastyle: Widgetising sharable stylesheets via linked data

Abstract

Several formats for embedding metadata into Web pages have been proposed and assisting publishers in semantically enhancing their content. However, little work has been done to explore the potential of those formats to benefit Web page design and styling. On the other hand, due to different employed markup mechanisms, a stylesheet composed with a specific embeddable data format cannot be applied to another without tedious and time-consuming manually tailoring of selectors. This paper proposes an approach to helping users to generate and share so-called micro-themes with semantic attribute selectors, via which themes can be widgetised so as to be more readable and reusable compared with those using traditional selectors, thanks to unambiguous Linked Data URIs. Metastyle is a proof-of-concept implementation of this approach and it enables micro-themes, containing annotations derived from specific vocabularies, to be conveniently shared with users having their pages enhanced based on those vocabularies or subsets thereof.