On 5/8/06, Drew McLellan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think what Chris is getting at (and forgive me if this is wrong, Chris ...) is that we can all see the massive benefits of microformats - but it's all slightly academic. As technical folk, we know that structured data is important and valuable, and therefore is practical to us. However, your average web designer isn't used to knocking up perl scripts to parse juicy data out of a page to use for something awesome. It's this crowd that needs to see practical examples of full round-trip use (like live clipboard) before they'll 'get it' and see the benefit enough to start implementing in earnest. Is that right Chris?
Yes, that captures pretty much what I'm getting at. And I'm all about getting real/concrete and so on to make microformats.org a much more useable resource for all comers -- whether core "committers" in the community, whether casual web developers, whether bloggers, the media, template creators... whomever. This stuff isn't rocket science but you wouldn't know it with words like "normative" and "n optimization" flying around! I mean, even the definition would turn most humans off -- and microformats are for humans! One popular definition from our mailing list (http://microformats.org/discuss/) (see also: mailing-lists) is "simple conventions for embedding semantics in HTML to enable decentralized development." More precisely, microformats can be defined as: simple conventions for embedding semantic markup for a specific problem domain in human-readable (X)HTML/XML documents, Atom/RSS feeds, and "plain" XML that normalize existing content usage patterns using brief, descriptive class names often based on existing interoperable standards to enable decentralized development of resources, tools, and services How does rails describe itself? As an "opinionated framework for developing web applications and has a considerable amount of flexibility in the back end." Pretty plain spoken if you ask me. So what are microformats? "Microformats are simple codes that you can use to identity specific kinds of data, like people or events, in your webpages." Why would you use them? "Microformats make it easy for you or anyone who can see your webpages to reuse or your data and content elsewhere -- for example, to populate an address book, examine social relationships, share reviews, tag content or publish events." Something like that. On the current site, we have "Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards" which talks about what they *are* but not what you can *do* with them! So yeah -- anyway -- improving language is one thing, improving the site architecture and discoverability is another. I've been in touch with Drew and a woman named Vera who is an instructional designer about improvements to the site. I've created a series of icons for the Mac for microformats that I'd like to release soon... I want to smooth the transition between the great-looking homepage and the wiki. I want more visual examples and, as Drew said, I want more round-trip examples that make people go "holy sh!t that's amazing!" I'm open to ideas on how to organize this work. I can open up a Basecamp account if there's interest (despite Tantek's dislike of the tool). As Ryan pointed out, it's true, it's time for me to quit my bitching and start getting something done. Busy as I am, I think we can work incrementally -- but my concern at the moment is bringing more help in and sustaining the effort. Chris _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
