[microformats-discuss] XML & microformats (WAS: Take 3)

Sat Sep 17 10:14:55 PDT 2005

On Sep 17, 2005, at 10:07 AM, Lucas Gonze wrote:
> On 9/17/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
>> I do believe microformats *are* incredibly useful -- I'm just (still)
>> trying to get my head around -which- problems it is truly useful for,
>> so I neither sell them short nor over-hype them.
>> If you already have an application context which uses HTML, and you
> want to benefit from third-party hacks, microformats are the one true
> solution.
>> The idea of replacing existing XML formats intended solely for machine
> processing with the equivalent semantic HTML strikes me as irrational
> exuberance.

I'll go along with that, but I was asking a slightly different 
question (I think). Is there any benefit to using the semantic 
tagging of microformats *directly* in XML? For example, should the 
Atom community adopt "<link rel=tag>" or "<link rel=payment>" rather 
than, say, adding "<tag>" or "<tipjar>" fields directly?
My impression was that Tantek was saying "yes", but that the market 
(so far) had said "no." But, I'm not even sure I'm asking the right 
question, much less whether I have the right answer -- which is why I 
brought it up.
-- Ernie P.