[uf-discuss] Comments from IBM/Lotus rep about Microformats

Thu Dec 7 13:09:58 PST 2006

On Dec 7, 2006, at 12:29 PM, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> On 12/7/06, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
>> ...
>>> The RDF dream of having a generic parser and model has yet to win on
>> the open web. I'm more than happy to let the market decide whether
>> it's more value to have formats that are easy to publish, or those
>> that are easy to parse (I'm sure you can guess which side I'll take).
>> Why does this need to be an either/or choice? Why must
> ease-of-authoring trade-off generality here?

I'm not saying that it has to be, but that it appears to be so in 
practice. I've found that general purpose data formats are harder to 
author than specific ones. For example, HTML is more work than 
Markdown for the kinds of writing that Markdown allows. I tend to use 
Markdown pretty often because of that.
> ...
>>> Also, I'm not sure how 'people not getting their pet properties' is a
>> problem specific to microformats.
>> True. It doesn't mean it has to repeat the same mistake though. I
> would certainly hope the HTML 5 effort would be open minded about
> learning from all of the efforts in this space.

HTML 5 has profile URIs and the specification is much more clear as 
to how they are to be used (thanks to Tantek bugging Hixie about 
that). I think HTML 5's current extension methods (profiles, rel and 
class) are sufficient.
-ryan