[uf-discuss] Re: Microformats are being discussed on Slashdot

Tue Jul 11 22:54:14 PDT 2006

Tantek,
> Sounds like a good source for some easily answered FAQs.
>> Who wants to help dissect, itemize, and answer?

OK, here is a start - for some perverse reason I've tried to glean 
anything remotely meaningful even if totally wrong headed from the 
discussion.
Few seem to have taken the time to RTFA, which of course being /. we 
knew already eh?
john
___
Some of us have been doing this for YEARS. At least now we have a 
buzzword for it.
Anyone who has ever had to do a datamining project knows how to do 
this. I don't really think this is a big deal at all. Just another 
excuse to apply a Web 2.0 buzzword to a technique that's been around 
for quite a while.
Mixing presentation and data - good... bad... good. But it gets 
better a little, each time (maybe more of a spiral than a wheel).
How much of microformats could have been done using META, given that 
it's scoped to the page (which is no problem for the most important 
page semantics), and uses attributes? [claiming to be yawn barger]
Microformats seem to be a classic 'bag taped to the side', because 
the logic of the semantic web was still poorly visualised when XML 
was selected. I'm just asking whether META doesn't deserve 
rehabilitation as a 'bag at the top' instead...
Since the association between the human- and machine- readable texts 
is wholly imaginary, why not keep the machine vesion in META
It was all done 20 years before the web existed, as SGML. But thanks 
for playing.
This is just tagging in text; it's exactly what you do for CSS: 
You're saying this text is of a certain class. And you contain it in 
a box. All this is doing is using the same stuff and storing a little 
variable name and using it later. One might argue you are already 
doing that with CSS, it's just formatting stuff you're attaching to 
the variable rather than, ah, data structure..
I'm sure the LISP community would love to hear about this brand-new 
idea of embedding specialy, or domain-specific if you will, languages 
and data. How extraordinarilly novel
The problem with standards is that people keep making new ones
Ok, so this "microformats" thing is about encoding extra data inside 
an HTML file by abusing CSS class names for markup, isn't that 
completly unnecessary and nothing more than an ugly hack? Don't we 
have XML namespaces for exactly that reason?
The ugliness of this "microformat" thing is that it's shoehorning the 
function of elements into attributes: you have an attribute (in this 
case, the "class") that determines what the element really 
represents. WTF? This is best represented in XML: make an XML 
document type that specifies all these elements properly.
I mean, why do you need HTML for this at all? Your browser can 
display XML documents if you have an appropriate stylesheet (which 
these "microformats" also need anyway).
But, yes, you're right to point out that the buzzword web is 
reinventing yet another tool needlessly and badly.
There's no namespacing. There's not even an ATTEMPT at namespacing. 
This will fast become an unmanageable hodge-podge of insanity, with 
common words used willy-nilly in class attributes
Now, as if that wasn't bad enough, and, trust me, it IS bad enough, 
there's also the misuse of the "title" attribute and the "abbr" 
element. A machine formatted date is not the expanded version of a 
human formatted date, which is not an abbreviation. A renderer trying 
to make sense of &lt;abbr class="dtstart" title="10034134134T00"&gt; 
17th Smarch&lt;/abbr&gt; will think "AHA! This here is an 
abbreviation, I will provide unto the user some means to see what 
that '17th Smarch' abbrevation stands for!" Usability disasters follow.
There's , but there don't seem to be many people using microformats 
taking advantage of it.
And I think that muddling data and presentation without explicit 
distinction is exactly what was wrong with HTML. Which we just spent 
a decade slightly recovering from. I guess IBM has made a lot of 
money on crappy tools, good tools to extract data from crappy data, 
and extra money for doing it right.
If you want to make your data available there are all sorts of 
standard and more efficient ways of doing it than embedding it in the 
presentation layer. If somebody is going to all the trouble to create 
a parseable human-readable page, why wouldn't they go to about the 
same amount of trouble and make a far more efficient and standard RSS 
feed? What about the buzzword of the last few years, SOAP? Hell, what 
about XML?
____
John Allsopp
style master :: css editor :: http://westciv.com/style_master
blog :: dog or higher :: http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher
WebPatterns :: http://webpatterns.org
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