[microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others

Mon Oct 3 18:42:16 PDT 2005

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". :-)
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.
-- Ernie P.
On Oct 3, 2005, at 5:55 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 1:09 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>>> In my opinion XHTML would need to be enhanced by much more than
>>> microformats for it to become useful as a general XML document 
>>> format.
>>>> Who said "general xml document format"? Not I.
>>>> 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 trying to overload the format to handle different type of
>>> applications will increase its complexity while decreasing its 
>>> utility
>>> for each application domain.
>>>> Of course, though, each extension can be independent of others.
>> 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.
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