On Sep 24, 2006, at 2:19 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote:
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Scott
Reynen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
In the currency-brainstorming [1] page, I see a few straw man
proposals with dated currency.
No you don't; you see two real, albeit simplified for clarity,
examples
[3], [4], marked up according to the straw-man proposal (and
subsequent
suggested modifications).
If I'm understanding this, the examples on the -brainstorming page
are taken from real-world examples not yet detailed on the -examples
page. What's not clear to me now is how it was decided which
sections of those real-world examples are relevant to the currency
microformat and which are out-of-scope. Dates look out-of-scope to
me. If I'm right about this, then the straw man proposals should
reflect this. But assuming I'm wrong, I think it's safe to also
assume other people will be similarly wrong, and so it would be good
to have a clear explanation of why dates are included while other
loosely related information (e.g. tax, discounts, accepted forms of
payment, etc.) are not, in the wiki where everyone can find it. If
such an explanation is in there already, I've missed it.
I think I understand the general idea, that currencies change value
over time, but in what currently published HTML would such date
markup
be used?
Any page which says "used to be worth", "was paid" "used to earn",
"then
valued at", etc., etc.
It could also be used to mark up current prices, on pages which are
not
likely to be updated when the value referred to changes (e.g. reviews
[5]), or simply devalues through inflation (e.g. news stories [6],
[7]).
As I said before, my suspicion is that /relatively/ few pages on
today's web are actually publishing a date for the currency values
(which may or may not be the same as the publication date), but I'd
be happy to see this suspicion of mine clearly contradicted by /more/
specific examples in the currency-examples page.
I'm sure there are examples of dated currency published on the web,
but I suspect they are far under 20% of the currency values
published.
So?
When fewer people are publishing something, we have a smaller pool of
potential adopters of a microformat. Microformats face a chicken-egg
problem because publishers are hesitant to start publishing something
with few tools to consume it, and tool developers are hesitant to
develop new tools to consume microformat data that isn't yet widely
published. And without both publishers and tool developers using a
microformat, it's not really helping anyone. For this reason, we
first target types of data that are being widely published, to
maximize the likelihood of success for a specific microformat. This
is my take on what many refer to as simply "the 80/20 rule," as
mentioned on the process page in the *-brainstorming section. I'm
sure someone else can explain it better, as I wasn't around when this
rough number system was adopted as a decision-making standard in this
community. I mention the (suspected) lack of published dated
currency because I'd like to see a currency microformat adopted, and
I suspect removing the dates from an initial version would make that
adoption more likely.
I'm interested in seeing this microformat completed and adopted and
I'd hate to see unnecessary complexity prevent that from happening.
There is absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be completed and
adopted;
there is no "unnecessary complexity".
I think you might be underestimating the difficulty of convincing
people to use microformats. But I'll be happy to find I was wrong
come adoption time.
Peace,
Scott
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
