Could I convince you to forward this blog post to me by e-mail? ian@hixie.ch

Alternatively, you can forward it to the WHATWG mailing list: http://www.whatwg.org/mailing-list#specs

Either way, having this by e-mail would be really helpful in improving the spec.

Here's what the whole Turtle block you quote above, recast as microdata (and using slightly different markup to make better use of HTML, though that isn't necessary to use Microdata):

 <div item="http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#Work">
  <link itemprop="about" href="http://purl.oreilly.com/works/45U8QJGZSQKDH8N">
  <dl>
   <dt>Title</dt>
   <dd><cite itemprop="http://purl.org/dc/terms/title">Just a Geek</cite></dd>
   <dt>By</dt>
   <dd><span itemprop="http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator">Wil Wheaton</span></dd>
   <dt>Format</dt>
   <dd itemprop="http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#realization"
        item="http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#Expression">
    <link itemprop="about" href="http://purl.oreilly.com/products/9780596007683.BOOK">
    <link itemprop="http://purl.org/dc/terms/type" href="http://purl.oreilly.com/product-types/BOOK">
    Print
   </dd>
   <dd itemprop="http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#realization"
        item="http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#Expression">
    <link itemprop="about" href="http://purl.oreilly.com/products/9780596802189.EBOOK">
    <link itemprop="http://purl.org/dc/terms/type" href="http://purl.oreilly.com/product-types/EBOOK">
    Ebook
   </dd>
  </dl>
 </div>

Can I use this example in the spec? Real world examples would indeed make this much better to understand.

What's the use case for marking this up, by the way? I'm always curious how people are using RDF in the wild.

There's some tools for Microdata, though not many since it only started existing a few months ago.

One tool is Philip Taylor's:
   http://philip.html5.org/demos/microdata/demo.html

Another is James Graham's:
   http://james.html5.org/microdata/

If I paste the markup above into Philip's tool, it outputs the following RDF:

@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix xhv: <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#> .
@prefix dct: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix c: <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/custom#> .

<http://purl.oreilly.com/works/45U8QJGZSQKDH8N>
  rdf:type <http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#Work> ;
  dct:title "Just a Geek" ;
  dct:creator "Wil Wheaton" ;
  <http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#realization> <http://purl.oreilly.com/products/9780596007683.BOOK> ;
  <http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#realization> <http://purl.oreilly.com/products/9780596802189.EBOOK> .

<http://purl.oreilly.com/products/9780596007683.BOOK>
  rdf:type <http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#Expression> ;
  dct:type <http://purl.oreilly.com/product-types/BOOK> .

<http://purl.oreilly.com/products/9780596802189.EBOOK>
  rdf:type <http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#Expression> ;
  dct:type <http://purl.oreilly.com/product-types/EBOOK> .

<>
  xhv:item <http://purl.oreilly.com/works/45U8QJGZSQKDH8N> .