[microformats-discuss] Microformats, REST, and XML

Mon Sep 19 12:52:20 PDT 2005

On Sep 19, 2005, at 12:26 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
> On Sep 19, 2005, at 12:05 PM, Kevin Marks wrote:
>> Another angle on the discussions regarding XML vs XHTML, and 
>> touching on REST, is the context of use.
>>>> If you are using XML to pass data around between your own 
>> applications and never touching the web, then the extra degree of 
>> control gained by constructing your own arbitrary data structure 
>> in XML may be worth it.
>>>> If however, you are intending to send the data over a webserver, 
>> using a REST API, then using microformats in XHTML (and in 
>> particular XOXO) has many benefits:
>> Fascinating. This is one of the things I've wondered about. In a 
> world where everybody "grokked" microformats, would there ever be a 
> need for new (public) XML documents? Or could we do everything with 
> microformatted XHTML -- and, perhaps, Atom.

Tantek and Kevin talked about this last year: http://tantek.com/ 
presentations/20040928sdforumws/semantic-xhtml.html
Beware of broken links in that presentation, though.
> Certainly, I would think things like DocBook would make far more 
> sense as a XHTML application rather than their own XML schema.

+1
-ryan
> This is more than a theoretical question. As you know, Mac OS X 
> uses property lists (the moral equivalent of XOXO, at least to 
> first order) for many types of data transport. There's often 
> discussion about when/where an app should simply use a plist 
> dictionary for data storage vs. defining a custom XML document type.
>> What would this list recommend as the best practice (assuming plist 
> = XOXO for purpose of discussion)?