On Feb 1, 2007, at 7:31 AM, Charles Roper wrote:
What does the community feel should be the focus for species at present? Now that I know that the analysis of existing practice is about the existing *content* rather than existing *markup*,
That's not entirely true. Existing markup plays a large role in what is published. Obviously it's not all going to be standardized, but if there are some common class names and general structure that is used, that may be taken into consideration, especially a case where, unlike hcard and hcalendar, there isn't already a commonly used format with a spec already written out. In a case like that, existing markup becomes very important.
The main idea right now would be to be discussing things on the brainstorming page. Read over Andy's strawman, debate it. If need be, draw up another draft, and another, until you can reach some kind of consensus amongst the interested parties. It may be relevant to "check in" with this list from time to time, but by and large people who are interested should be going to and talking on, the relevant wiki pages.
If I've gotten any of the above paragraph wrong, list, feel free to jump in.
I'm less inclined to say the existing proposal is *over*complex. Sure, it looks complex to the untrained eye because the taxonomic hierarchy *is* complex, but then so is the full hCard spec. My own view is that because species is an extraction of the existing Linnaen taxonomic hierarchy ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linnaen_taxonomy ... its complexity is justified, surely? I'm still able to be persuaded either way on this one, though, should a compelling argument arise.
You might want to consider writing up a document that explains some of the choices you made to someone with only passing (high school level) knowledge of taxonomy. Are there other taxonomical systems? Why did you chose this one? How standard is it? Are people using any informal standards that might be more widespread? If they are, why did you reject them?
I know some of those questions are answered on the Wikipedia, and I'm not even sure that this list is the right place to post those answers to be posted, as well.
It might be helpful to add something like that to the microformats process itself -- I think it could be a helpful tool for specification writers to make them think about the document they're writing a little harder about exactly what they're doing.
-Colin _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
