On 1/29/06 9:36 PM, "Mark Rickerby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have been working away at this over the past week, and I'm starting > to realise that simplicity and minimalism is sometimes more tricky to > get right than complexity and overabundance. <snip> Mark, First of all, thank you for writing up your review. There are many good points and good suggestions for improvement in there, and I look forward to seeing a bunch of them implemented. Your review made me think about some more aspects of what we are doing as a (still) fairly new community which have largely been implicit, but deserve some explicit mentioning. As far as how did we get here, literally what you see with both the microformats site and wiki is are the expanding minimum steps to enable more and more folks to understand and implement and/or use microformats, within the time available to contribute that everyone working on the site has had. When presented with an opportunity to spend five minutes improving something or writing something to enable a few key developers and publishers, vs. spending days writing something to enable many more, we have chosen the five minutes tasks. This is actually quite different than classical publishing, or standards work in many ways (I and a bunch of folks here have some experience with both). But these differences are not accidental, there are actually very good reasons for them. A few: 1. Breadth. There are so many such five minute tasks, that if you spent days on any one of them you would get very few things done overall. 2. Adaptive Evolution. It is much better to spend five minutes with an incremental improvement, and get potentially get some feedback quickly and make corrections quickly, than to spend days on something only to find out it wasn't what people were looking for. 3. Distribution of work. Many more people can work on many more small five minute tasks, than can on any number of multi-day tasks. 4. Lower barrier to entry/participation/contribution. When anyone can visit a page and spend only a few minutes improving things, rather than having to spend days, orders of magnitude more people will help out. A lot of what we've written up in the microformats process is specifically designed to provide those interested in pursuing microformats with, for lack of a better word, a series of bite-size "microtasks" to complete when they can. For these reasons and more, I suggest that any improvements try to take as much of the incremental approach as possible. Any improvements that you would think might improve all of a certain type of document could perhaps be done on one first to see how it goes, and adapt and adjust from there. Now, not everything can be done as a 5 minute task, but we do try to minimize such tasks to only those that are absolutely essential. Drafting new specs is among them. Designing the site at the beginning was as well. However, at this point, I'm very much convinced that such tasks are (and very much should be) the exception rather than the rule. One thing I have found that helps a lot with tasks that seem to require more time than a five minute chunk, is to add them to the to-do page, and iterate on them, breaking them down into smaller tasks. As far as where to go from here, I'd definitely recommend that you add a section for yourself on the to-do page and move a bunch of the documentation you have for what you want to improve there, to collect the thoughts and allow some iteration. http://microformats.org/wiki/to-do Some of the suggestions you made will be really easy to do quickly, and others will require additional thought and discussion (I didn't think it would be effective to use email to discuss/debate all the assumptions etc. that went into various suggestions - I think the wiki will work better for that). Depending on how much depth you go into, it may require additional pages. I hope some of this background and philosophy is helps provide understanding and context for what we is microformats today, and I hope to see your outline of improvement suggestions. Thanks again very much for your review and suggestions. I'm eagerly looking forward to the improvements. Tantek _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
