I've been giving some thought to the problems (as I see them) of parsing
microformatted data inside web pages, and of nesting microformats inside
each other. I should say I'm fully on-board with the understatement and
general "fuzziness" of microformats, particularly when it comes to
authoring content. But I think it creates problems when it comes to
parsing content, particularly when one microformat *might* contain another.
I've been thinking that if there were a formal, machine-readable spec in
a BNF or DTD-style of each microformat, then parsers could be generated
by machines from the spec, relieving developers from writing
hand-parsers. These machine generated parsers can be designed to handle
nesting of microformats (e.g., can tell the difference between a "title"
in a hentry and a "title" in an hcard).
I've written up this idea on my blog here:
http://smackman.com/2006/06/01/an-old-idea/
I think it's actually very straight-forward to implement, puts no new
burden on the authors adding microformat syntax to their web pages, and
relieves parser-writers of a lot of work.
Thoughts?
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