On Jan 25, 2007, at 3:01 PM, stephen mulcahy wrote:
I've read a few introductory articles and faqs but still have some
questions about how microformats fit together and work. When I first
came across microformats I had the (mistaken) impression that they
were
a way for anyone to arbitrarily mark-up their data. After some more
reading and a little contempltation I come to the (obvious)
understanding that that couldn't really work - I mean, what good is a
formatting your data in a format that only you can understand (I guess
it might make some sense for large organisations but apart from
that ...)?
Homebrewed semantics aren't nearly as useful as microformats, but
they do have some value. When I'm trying to make use of data on
another site, and I look at their source and see it has description
markup, that makes my job easier, and makes the web better.
Microformats are just the logical next step.
So my current understanding of microformats is that they are a new
approach to adding meaning to the web by (lightly) tagging existing
content (in XHTML) to add a semantic dimension to documents. The
barrier
to entry is pretty low because in a little of cases you can tag your
existing content by simply adding some class attributes to your
document, right?
Basically, yes.
This contrasts with the semantic web where you need to
take your data in its existing formats and create RDF from it.
Right.
In terms of standards - is
http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page#Specifications a definitive
list
of the microformats in use?
Not exactly. Many of the drafts are in use. Many of the exploratory
discussions are even in use. Those under "specifications" are in use
widely enough and/or long enough to be considered relatively stable.
But it's really more of a spectrum.
If someone wants to introduce a new one is
the approach described in -
http://microformats.org/wiki/faq#Q:_When_should_I_use_a_microformat.
3F_What_are_they_for.3F.22
the best way to approach things?
That depends on what you mean by "introduce a new one." If you mean
newly introduce an existing microformat to your markup, yes. If you
mean to propose a new microformat, you should look at the process.
I guess in most cases this info is already on manufacturers websites,
but its certainly not amenable to scraping and parsing semantically
(and
maybe its not in the interests of the manfacturers to provide the
information in a format that lets me easily compare them to other
manufacturers) but it strikes me that if they did .. it would be
really,
really easy for me to go to all the major manufacturers websites, suck
them their microformatted data and then analyse it off line - I see
something like an openoffice datapilot table (microsoft excel pivot
table) where I can click various filters to match my criteria above
and
sort the output according to something like price and voila, my
choices
are obvious - is there a microformat that lends itself to this sort of
thing already.
Is this the kind of scenario that microformats could meet or am I way
off of the mark?
See hProduct and hListing:
http://microformats.org/wiki/product
http://microformats.org/wiki/hlisting
These have been in progress for a while, and if you're interested in
this area, I'd encourage you to review the process, look at what's
missing in the wiki, and try to move this forward to a microformat
that will suit your needs.
I guess even if manufacturers didn't want to
participate in this, there are lots of sites out there that review
laptops - if you could get them to sign-up to this the microformatted
information would become available quickly (all it would take is one
person to review a laptop).
Right, adoption is the hard part. It helps to get interested parties
involved in the discussion early.
Peace,
Scott
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