Toby A Inkster wrote:
Guillaume Lebleu wrote:
What I have been thinking more and more and what this tells me again is
that the same way we talk of POSH and microformats, we could talk of
plain text or plain old english formats, essentially standardizing how
people write dates, addresses, etc on the Web or on their emails. Asking
people to write "Tuesday, February 5, 2008" in this order, with the
commas, etc. is very likely even simpler for normal people than writing
<abbr class="foo" title="2008-05-02">Tuesday, February 5, 2008</abbr>.
One problem with that is that it will find matches on people who aren't
even intending to use your plain-old-english format. They may happen to be
including "Tuesday, February 5, 2008" on their pages with a different
intended meaning. 2008 could refer to eight minutes past eight PM in
military time -- unlikely, but possible. And as you move away from dates,
phone numbers and postcodes which have relatively parseable formats,
towards locations, people's names and job titles and so on, the likelihood
of false matches increases.
The use of explicit tags to mark up information do make microformats
slightly harder to use, yes. But the key is that they also make
microformats much easier to explicitly not use.
Toby,
I understand the challenge of disambiguation and the value microformats
bring in terms of easier parser implementation and more reliable
information consumption experience. The challenge for average people
writing microformats can't be underestimated though. I strongly believe
that the time where disambiguation costs are the lowest are at
publishing time, but this is also the time where you are focused on the
english content, not the microformats. This is why in the second part of
the post you cited, I suggested the use of Apple Data Detectors' like
functionality, not to detect objects in plain old english (POE) in
published content, but to detect objects in POE at the time they are
written and ask for the user for disambiguation at the same time, in a
way that the underlying microformat markup is generated, but without the
user having to know the syntax. I'm thinking of this particularly in the
context of writing a blog post: writing 1 hCards just to say "My friend
Joe" is way too much for normal people. On the other end, if, as I type
this, I get an intellisense-like list of my contacts that I can select
from, then I can just select Joe from the list and have the microformat
markup added for me (just like Wordpress adds a lot of markup that isn't
in the visual editor or like Wiki converts simplified markup into HTML
markup).
Guillaume
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