On 28 Jun 2007, at 14:40, Thom Shannon wrote:
I get your point, but as Alex pointed out people are interested in this microformats thing but dont want to call it that, journos are refusing to talk about it because "the term 'microformats' would only appeal to developers, and not the average reader"
But it is impossible to have a meaningful or descriptive name that catches all microformats, let alone to an ‘average reader’. I'm also not sure which subset of journalists wish to write articles about the data formats themselves, but whose audience would balk at a reference to microformats.org.
Anyone writing for the average user would surely be writing in the context of browser functionality (as and when it ships: namely Firefox 3). And when referencing the functionality of those features, it makes most sense to use the terms ‘address’, ‘location’, ‘map’, ‘event’, ‘appointment’, ‘contact’ or ‘business card’ and other such words. That's all microformats are to end users. We provide a standardised, digital form of those physical-world concepts. A journalist could write ‘Firefox 3 allows you to interact with business cards and events in web pages like never before, bridging the gap between the pages you read and other applications’. That is surely a gazillion times better than trying to encourage ‘Firefox 3 ships with support for Hyper Data, which allows web pages to…’. Such a generic and meaningless term not only adds nothing, but distracts from the real benefits of Microformat deployment (by which I mean all the name suggestions in this thread, not just my facetious overuse of the word ‘hyper’).
We need a way to get across to people that content can be lifted out of pages and used in useful ways, when those pages support it. And people need to call it something. Maybe it should just be "Reusable Information".
For the people who will be putting the data in the pages — developers — we have names. Yes, microformats and h* is all very techie, but that's perfectly acceptable for developers.
End-users don't need to know anything at all about _how_ or _why_ their new browser functionality works, only that it's an awesome new feature that's going to improve their life.
Who is the group in the middle that this wooly new terminology is going to serve? I don't see it.
Ben _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
