[uf-discuss] LinkedIn and Microformats

Wed Jun 14 12:47:21 PDT 2006

On Jun 14, 2006, at 6:22 AM, Scott Reynen wrote:
> On Jun 14, 2006, at 8:08 AM, Hans Gerwitz wrote:
>>> Just to +1 Chris: I understand that validation is orthogonal for 
>> Pingerati, but the uF community really needs a reference 
>> validator. (Where's Pilgrim when you need him?)
>> I assume Mark is still working on the validator he mentioned a 
> while back. Meanwhile, the rest of us could help validation 
> efforts by creating test cases. I know Ryan and others are 
> collecting some tests here:
>> http://microformats.org/tests/
>> But those appear to be more parsing tests than validation tests. 
> What about establishing a section on the wiki where we could 
> collaboratively collect sample input and expected validator output 
> (e.g. Pass, Pass with warning "Profile not found," Fail with error 
> "Required property not found," etc. )?

You're right that these cover just parsing/extracting, not authoring 
feedback.
I'm currently working on a microformats parser (in ruby) which I'll 
hopefully soon publish open-source, which I intend to be the basis of 
validator/feedback mechanism.
I'm doing my development test-driven, meaning that anything in the 
parser is there because there's a test case. So, as Scott points out, 
writing test cases could be *extremely* useful at this point.
I know that its not entirely clear from an outsider's perspective 
(ie, outside the 2 or 3 of us who've been writing test cases) how to 
get started with writing them, but if you're interested, I'm more 
than willing to help you get started with it.
I intend to have full test suites which can illustrated how one 
should parse and convert microformats- I think this will be a huge 
help for implementors to become and stay interoperable.
-ryan