Ciaran McNulty wrote:
As a tangential note from the discussion about a standardised JSON
format, it would be useful to be able to represent uF data as
datastructures in other programming languages.
There seems to be a lot of confusion here about the differences between
syntax, structure, and semantics. What is the difference between
{"given-name": "John", "family-name": "Doe"}
{"family-name": "Doe","given-name": "John"}
There is a potential structural difference (e.g., in PHP, where
associative arrays have order) but the syntax is the same and (depending
on the application) the semantics are probably the same. What's the
difference between
{"given-name": "John", "family-name": "Doe"}
{ "given-name" => "John", "family-name" => "Doe" }
There is only a syntactic difference, in that the former is Javascript
and the latter is Ruby. Both the structure and the semantics are
identical, that is: create a mapping such that the string "given-name"
associates with "John", and the string "family-name" associates with "Doe".
The point is that different representations can have the same structure
and semantics. In this case, it seems like a mistake to talk about a
representational mapping. As far as I understood, microformats is
primarily concerned about adding semantic value specifically to HTML.
This is done with well-defined structure that translates (as defined by
microformats) into the syntax of HTML.
So then, what is the difference between
{"given-name": "John", "family-name": "Doe"}
<span class="given-name">John</span><span class="family-name">Doe</span>
Primarily a syntactic one. Structurally they are the same and
semantically they are both hCard fragments. A more fundamental
difference, however, is that the latter is the primary syntax;
conversion from HTML to JSON will be lossy. Furthermore, the semantics
are now twice filtered: the converter has to be as up-to-snuff on the
currently defined classes as the consuming application itself. Finally,
you lose many of the benefits of hypertext: the include pattern no
longer works, URIs become strings, and it isn't clear how embedded
microformats should be handled.
The only real way to share microformatted information is to pass it
around in an HTML container, directly or as a URL. Defining a generic
conversion is a mistake. Instead, we should focus on semantics and let
applications define their own internal representations.
~D
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