I would really like microformats community to come up with a standardized JSON representation of microformat structures.
Over the last few weeks I have asked number of people involved with microformats parsers if they were interested in a common JSON description for output and the answer seems so far has been a strong yes. The main reason is that it could help us build shared test suite and enable comparative testing between the parsers. Just like the move by the IE team to publicly release their test suites so that browser manufactures can start to coalesce around a testable understanding of a specification. We should start to do the same for microformat parsers. What we need first is a single output format to test against. JSON seems to cross both client and server world well, so it would be my choice. It would also help people build applications more easily as they would be able to switch from one parser/service to another and reuse code a little more. I am currently working on a test suite that uses a POSH pattern to express JSON based asserts i.e. NodeValue(vcard[0].url[2]) = http://www.flickr.com/photos/glennjonesnet/ You can see an example here http://lab.backnetwork.com/testsuite/hcard/1.0/hcard1.htm This is ufxtract parsing the test http://lab.backnetwork.com/ufXtract/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flab.backnetwork.co m%2Ftestsuite%2Fhcard%2F1.0%2Fhcard1.htm&format=test-fixture&output=text I am coding a JavaScript test runner using ufxtract to parses the "test-fixture" POSH pattern then I run the asserts and get a pass/fail response. This is all very early prototype work, but hopefully it shows the value of standardized JSON representation of microformat structures. Glenn Jones www.glennjones.net _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
