On 4/21/06, Benjamin Carlyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > http://norman.walsh.name/2006/04/13/validatingMicroformats > > Microformat validation seems like a hard problem to me, or at least a
It's only a hard problem if you insist on using inappropriate technology to solve it. Norm is a smart guy, but he's completely on the wrong track thinking about how to build a useful validator for microformats. Perhaps he's hung up on the word "validator". Perhaps the word "linter" would be more accurate (although no end users would understand what it means). > 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. Wrong. See http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-dev/2006-April/000083.html > 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. Wrong. See http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-dev/2006-April/000083.html > So, what do we mean by microformat validation? I think x2v+human and > hAtom2Atom.xsl+human is the best we can hope for. I've seen a lot of this attitude, here and on uf-dev, and it is utterly wrong. (No offense to x2v. It's a great tool, but it's not a validator, nor is it a good basis for building a validator.) Perhaps the only way to convince you that a microformats validator would be useful is to build the validator I'm imagining and show you. -- Cheers, -Mark _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
