Im not advocating a name that catches all microformats, just the ones
that are useful to someone who wants to reuse data from a webpage. hCa*
and maybe a couple of others.
Why does this need a user facing name? Well it's going to be a very long
time before microformats are truely ubiquitous, so websites may want to
announce their support for this functionality. A lot of people will want
plugins until their preferred browser catches up (I'm looking at IE) how
do they know what plugin to get to use the data in these pages?
"This site supports Reusable Data, get a Reusable Data add-on for your
web browser to save typing things out"
Ben Ward wrote:
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
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