On Sep 23, 2006, at 12:54 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote:
Then again, if you're going to insist that we only develop
microformats
for data types used by virtually everyone, then development work will
soon cease to be necessary.
Andy,
The motivation behind creating a Microformat is to address an
identified *problem* or *need* when XHTML doesn't itself provide the
solution. See, in particular, the process [1]: "There must be a
problem to be solved. No problem, no microformat."
The number of people who currently use species names vs. the number
of people who currently use geo coordinates is beside the point.
There was a huge unfulfilled desire of people to add location
information to resources (as evidenced by the early grass-roots
efforts in geotagging and 3M+ geotagged photos); this was clearly a
problem that is appropriately addressed by Microformats.
Similarly for:
* aggregating events and adding events to desktop calendars (hCalendar)
* adding people to address books and quickly finding contact info
(hCard)
* making it easier to find jobs or employees with appropriate
qualifications (hResume)
... and so forth, which are problems and needs shared by a
substantial portion of the web community.
I agree that it would be *great* to have a standard, structured,
machine-readable species definitions; the question is whether doing
so will solve an existing problem and allow people to use data in a
way that previously wasn't possible. I don't have an answer to that
question, but I read "esoteric" as "this doesn't address a need
shared by a substantial portion of the web community."
- Matthew
[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/process
--
Infocraft: handcrafted markup for savvy designers.
http://www.infocraft.com/
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