(apologies for top posting but this is in response to Al's entire message, not to any specific point in particular)
Al, VERY well written. That's perhaps the clearest explanation I have seen of why it is important to have visible information, even somewhat visible rather than invisible. May I quote what you wrote in part or in full on microformats wiki? Thanks, Tantek On 5/3/07 6:18 PM, "Al Gilman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 12:24 AM +0100 4 05 2007, Patrick H. Lauke wrote: >> Tantek Çelik wrote: >> >>> 2. Keep both copies of the data at least somewhat visible to humans so that >>> at least *some* human eyes/ears can easily inspect both copies and ensure >>> that they have not diverged. >> >> For the sake of argument, though: assuming that those human >> eyes/ears use a microformat-consuming tool/extension/etc, this can >> still happen. If I have a page with, say, contact details marked as >> a hcard, and human users export it to Outlook, they'll be able to >> see (and ensure) whether or not the generated vcard details in the >> "add to address book" dialog match the page's visible details or not. >> >> After all, isn't that what microformats are there for? Being >> consumed by "machines" that can make something useful with them? > > Almost. > > They are there so that people and machines can share info. > > If the machineable info is not routinely passing through the > consciousness of the communicating principals (that is, people), then > it must be expected that the machine and the person will frequently > have different values for the same datum. Not a good thing. > > The old saw is, "out of sight, out of mind." In this case it is "use > it or lose it (it's validity)" for data. > > Microformats are to eliminate the mumbo-jumbo quality of the data > the machines deal with; rather to give them the same many-eyeballs > 'bazaar' checking support as the virally-maintained meanings of plain > English (Chinese, Arabic or what have you...). > > That's a little overstated, but the devil is in the details. > > If in some community of communication, the data is routinely > extracted into view often enough so that bad data tend to get weeded > out, then the storage or transmission form doesn't have to be > directly comprehensible by people. But one of the virtues of markup > languages is just how much of the info is directly under the quality > control of people; expressed in as little-encoded form as can be > gotten away with. > > Al _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
