On Jan 29, 2006, at 9:36 PM, Mark Rickerby 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.
:-)
... === Homepage (http://microformats.org) === ... For example, as Joe Average User, I would know based on the homepage text "People and Organizations: hCard", that this is a data format for displaying people and organizations, but then what? The link takes me to a complicated table of contents entitled "Draft Specification". I have to scroll down to see anything more concrete, and it's not immediately clear where to begin reading, nor how I can start using the format, without having to spend a few minutes hunting around the wiki for information, or searching for a tutorial somebody wrote and published elsewhere. If I'm not familiar with blogs or wikis (maybe a client heard about hCard, and asked me to implement it), it's going to take even longer.
Granted. A common criticism of http://microformats.org/ is that its too 'spec-y.'
Writing specs is necessary, but, of course, not sufficient.I'm not opposed to having tutorials and more beginner-friendly material on http://microformats.org, but AFAICT, those sorts of things don't write themselves.
...
I'll take a look at the about section. However, if there's any specific suggestions, I'll entertain them.
The other weakness of this section is that despite the landing page
providing a general overview, the sub-pages in this section are
actually more meta/socially oriented ("People", "Thanks"). It is
extremely important to provide respect and credit to all the people
involved in pushing this initiative forward, but again, this
organizational context is not immediately obvious for new users. The
expectation of an "about" section is to find all the simple, dumb
facts.
http://microformats.org/about/people/ is out-of-date and most certainly always will be. It might be better just to kill it.
=== Discuss (http://microformats.org/discuss/) === A spartan section, but very useful and well presented. Could potentially be more friendly and inviting? I know the notion of "community" is overused, but might still be a good idea to reflect it here somehow.
"community" *is* overused and *ambiguous*. I'm willing to improve this section, but I'm not hearing any actionably suggestions.
=== Code (http://microformats.org/code/ === Possibly useful to some people, but really doesn't have a lot to offer in comparison with the information on the wiki. and is very skewed in favour of XFN. I also find the labelling of this section slightly confusing, in that I would never expect a non-programmer to think that the term "Code" is aimed at them, yet the links on this page are generally of interest to non-programmers. "Tools" might be a more accurate description, which doesn't scare off those who are tech savy, but don't consider themselves hard-core coders.
Well, the plans for the section have included more diverse sorts of things. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten that part of the site moving very quickly.
=== Analysis & Suggestions === A very common question from new people on the mailing list goes like "Is there a microformat for X?" A (not always obvious) variation of the same question is "Here's my proposal for a microformat for X". It seems like the answer to almost all of these questions and proposals is "A combination of Y microformat and a semantic XHTML compound will solve your problem".From a meta perspective, these questions seem to be stirred from amismatch in vocabulary between defining a problem ("my content type is X") and defining a specific microformat oriented solution ("use hAtom and hCard"). The irony is that content types and usage of the formats is already very well documented on the current website, in terms of the current blog sidebar, and the faq and use wiki pages. So why do smart people continue to miss this?
People don't read.
... The homepage should provide immediate visual cues for those who have a vague idea of what microformats are, but are looking for a direct and pragmatic value proposition. The current featured text explains what microformats are, but not why they are useful or how simple they are to implement.
But, why are they useful? How simple are they to implement? :D
A "Get Started Now" link would be a great compliment or replacement for the existing "Find Out More" link, acting as a subtle call to action, and communicating to readers that they can potentially implement one or several microformats with their existing content in a matter of minutes.
I'd love to link to something like that from the homepage, but it doesn't exist. Write it, and it shall be linked.
...
I have some more related material to accompany this analysis (a site map), which I'll send through when I get a chance this week. If we look at doing incremental updates, my thoughts are that the greatest mileage would come from hand-picking the best introductory content from the wiki, and condensing it for the main site pages. If Tantek, Ryan, or anyone else feels that this is *not* a good way to approach the content process, please advise me, otherwise I'll go ahead and start tweaking some of the writing to suit, and pass it on to Tim, who has created a mockup of the main site for testing how pages look.
I think your analysis above is good. The best way to procede is to write something, then let us iterate on it.
It would also be great to hear from anyone who feels there is something immediate and obvious missing from the website, or has something that they would really like to see!
Thanks for all of your work, let me know what I can do to enable you. -- Ryan King [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
