[microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others

Mon Oct 3 20:12:18 PDT 2005

On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:42 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
> Hi Scott,
>>>> Do you see XHTML documents enhanced with microformats serving as a
>> general purpose xml content / data interchange format? Or is the
>> format intended to be primarily used in the context of a presenting
>> content to a human consumer along with sematic annotations?
>> I think your specific "general purpose" may be quite different than 
> our specific "general purpose". :-)

Exactly. Microformats are developed for specific purpose*s*, not 
usually for a *general purpose.* This is to avoid the "boiling the 
ocean" problem.
They, along with every other format should be evaluated on a case-by- 
case basis.
> Pretty much everything I do -- including applications I write or 
> worry about -- are intended for use by consumers I do not have a 
> direct trust relationship with -- and for whom human-readability is 
> always a *useful* aspect (even if not vital). They prefer to be 
> able to reuse their existing tools to consume that data without 
> knowing the schema in advance, even if that implies some loss of 
> rigor.
>> For that reason, I see XHTML+microformats as 'generally useful', 
> including for applications that others where others might be 
> tempted to use XML.
>>>> I was referring to XHTML application domains as either a general
>> purpose content container or as a presentation format. It seems to me
>> that these two functional requirements are in conflict with each
>> other.
>> If I'm going to publish in that format anyway, I might as well use 
> that as my data storage medium, since it is essentially self- 
> documenting data where *I* can extract the useful content *I* 
> need. It works for me. But my world may be different than yours.
>> As Tantek quoted Rohit as saying, we know microformats work for us 
> in practice; we do NOT know if they work in theory. Which is 
> another way of saying we can't give you a robust theoretical 
> justification for why _you_ should use microfomats even if you 
> don't want to. At this stage, it's more like "you either get them 
> or you don't."
>> Which is okay. If they don't make sense to you now, why not wait a 
> few months and check back then? We may have more answers. Or at 
> least have learned better how to express them.

Well said, Ernie.
-ryan