On Jan 31, 2007, at 1:06 PM, Charles Roper wrote:
I think what I'm trying to get at here is this: at present my feeling
(and this is just a feeling) is that the microfomats gaining most
traction are ones that are related quite closely to social networking
and, dare I say it, Web 2.0 concepts. I'm not saying that's a bad
thing, but I do feel that because there's not a lot of interest in
species and related matters within these circles (the interest lies in
technology, modern media and networking), that trying to develop a
species microformat at this point in time is going to be an uphill
struggle, simply because there aren't many people out there who would
take advantage of such a thing right now.
I don't think this community is entirely representative of the web at
large, so I wouldn't take perceived disinterest in this community to
necessarily mean a potential microformat has no promise. On the
other hand, the target audience for microformats is not just any
random person off the street, nor even any random person off the web;
it's publishers. So the important question is: what will it take to
get publishers publishing the kind of species markup you'd like to see?
I'm not really questioning the quality of the two approaches, but
rather the fundamental uF principle of "paving the cowpaths." As far
as I am aware (but please correct me if I am wrong), hCard is an
extraction of vCard rather than an extraction of existing markup
practice. This being the case, can other microformats, in the absence
of existing practice, not be developed on the back of existing,
canonical standards?
There are two aspects to this I fear you're conflating: the data and
the markup. The "cowpaths" here is the data. Microformats, the
"paving," is the standardized markup. If the markup were already
standardized, there would be no need for microformats. But if the
data isn't already commonly published, it doesn't matter how nice the
markup is. Contact data is incredibly common on the web, so hCard
was successful. Certainly using a 1-to-1 mapping of vCard helped,
but that's not nearly as important as the ubiquity of the data.
Better pavement is nice, but cowpaths are critical.
> This brings me to a question about Species. The Species proposal
> doesn't really reflect current mark-up practice but instead
represents
> what might be a good way of doing things in the future if
authors were
> to start using it.
I agree completely, and I think this is a problem with the current
effort, but it's one that is solveable.
If this *is* a problem, why wasn't it a problem with hCard? I'm not
trying to get at anyone here, I'm just trying to wrap my head around
this apparent anomaly.
I think confusing markup *was* a problem with hCard. Publishers
weren't familiar with using class names to describe content for
anything other than stylesheets. But the ubiquity of contact data on
the web meant that there so many potential hCard publishers out there
that the skeptics could be temporarily ignored while others adopted
hCard. Meanwhile, consuming applications were developed, which made
hCard more appealing to skeptics, and HTML semantics became better
understood generally, which made skeptics less skeptical. So it was
a problem that could be overcome in the case of hCard. Species
doesn't have the same luxuries of widespread publishing and eager
tool developers, but it does have the benefit of more widespread
understanding of HTML semantics brought about by previous
microformats (e.g. hCard).
Peace,
Scott
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