On Dec 6, 2006, at 5:45 AM, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
On 12/5/06, Scott Reynen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
...
In HTML or JSON, new formats need new parsers, which must be written
by someone.
Exactly. The point is if you have a generic model you have a
generic parser.
Elias is coming from an RDF background, and microformats
simply aren't RDF, and they never will be. And that's a good thing.
If what you want is RDF, just use RDF.
The issue isn't really microformats vs. RDF (except as RDF provides a
model), but microformats vs. RDFa.
Both microformats and RDFa are addressing the exact same use cases and
requirements (augmenting visible content with structured data).
RDFa includes namespacing, the lack of which is already a problem in
microformats (witness hCite and the serious awkwardness that title
will be indicate using fn), and which will grow over time as more and
more people want to mark up their content.
Moreover, the need to write dedicate code for each new microformat
will also present serious scalability problems.
Yes, in order to parse and consume microformats, you'll have to have
code that knows about those formats.
The RDF dream of having a generic parser and model has yet to win on
the open web. I'm more than happy to let the market decide whether
it's more value to have formats that are easy to publish, or those
that are easy to parse (I'm sure you can guess which side I'll take).
Finally, that there's no model at the heart of microformats with clear
extension rules means that the vaunted social process here is a mess.
It's all centralized, and people get frustrated when their pet
property isn't included because they know what that means: the tools
written for the blessed microformats won't see them.
I agree that there are cases where we can be more organized and I'm
more than willing to implement new tools or processes to do this.
Also, I'm not sure how 'people not getting their pet properties' is a
problem specific to microformats.
With other technologies, like XML, the person who didn't get their
pet property included in a given namespace could create their own
namespace and advocate that people make use of it. Still, I don't
believe that it changes the reality that tools won't know what to do
with it unless *someone* writes some code. I don't think the
situation is any worse in microformats, and it may in fact be better.
If your 'pet property' doesn't make it into a microformat, you can
still publish it and advocate that others use it. If consumers of
said microformat decide that the data is valuable, they'll parse it
and if enough people do this, then it'll get added to the microformat.
-ryan
--
Ryan King
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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