See dev list: http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-dev/2006-April/000082.html http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-dev/2006-April/000083.html
-brian Benjamin Carlyle wrote: > On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 23:38 +0100, Nick Swan wrote: > >> I'm working on a tool for discovering and validating microformats. >> > ... > >> I could really do with a flow diagram or something like that of how to >> parse/validate microformats. >> > ... > >> On 4/20/06, Breton Slivka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> norman walsh recently posted inn his blog about this very >> issue >> http://norman.walsh.name/2006/04/13/validatingMicroformats >> > > Microformat validation seems like a hard problem to me, or at least a > low-value one. Here are the problems I see: > > 1) Microformats permit any underlying html structure to be used, so > there is nothing to validate there that the w3c validator doesn't > already do. > 2) Microformats allow arbitrary extension though the use of custom html > classes provided by the document author. Unknown classes are still > valid, so they can't be declared as errors. > 3) The only validation that is possible is to ensure all data that must > be present in a particular microformat is present. That also seems a > little lightweight to me, because most microformats are fairly > minimialist in their approach to what information must be provided. It's > human's first and machines second, so whatever you happen to publish is > probably enough to be marked up as a microformat. > > So what does validation mean for a micrormat? I think the only criteria > for success that we can meaningfully apply is that the data we put into > the document came back out again through a machine-operated process. We > already have the machine operated processes for various microformats > (x2v, hAtom2Atom.xsl, etc), but a human must still be in the loop to > determine whether all of their data got through or not. Unfortunately, > that's another "by definition" problem. If the data isn't > machine-readable in the first place, a machine won't know it's missing. > > So, what do we mean by microformat validation? I think x2v+human and > hAtom2Atom.xsl+human is the best we can hope for. We can try and do > heuristic validation ("this class name you used looks like one that > could mean something if it were written in a different way"), but the > heuristics would have to be bourne out of implementation experience with > "common errors" for particular microformats. > > Comments? > > Benjamin. > > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss > > _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
