Derrick Lyndon Pallas wrote:
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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I may be pretty quiet on this mailing list, but I second this. I
especially like the last two sentences.
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