There have been some interesting blog posts by people at the BBC, Mozilla and W3C about Microformats and RDFa in the past two days. The first covers BBC's decision to drop support for the abbr-based design pattern written by Michael Smethurst (who worked with this community on hAudio among other things):
Removing abbr-based Microformats from BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2008/06/removing_microformats_from_bbc.shtml The second is a response from John Resig, of jQuery/Mozilla fame, here: BBC Removing Microformat Support http://ejohn.org/blog/bbc-removing-microformat-support/ The third is written by Mark Birbeck, who is the guy that proposed RDFa several years ago and is the primary one behind the processing rules and architecture for RDFa: Microformats and RDFa are not as far apart as people think http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/2008/06/microformats-and-rdfa-are-not-as-far.html We've had discussions that parallel the ones above last summer: http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-July/000592.html http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-October/010850.html http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-October/010859.html http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-October/010879.html I tend to agree with Edd Dumbill's post: http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/06/24-uf-rdfa Some are moving too quickly to dismiss both Microformats AND RDFa - the two communities are cross-pollinating and there has been significant lessons learned from both approaches. If you're going to blog about this or discuss it - please don't fuel the Microformats vs. RDFa fire by picking sides... it's detrimental to both communities. Like Edd stated in his post, we have a bug that we need to fix (abbr design pattern causing screen reader usability issues) and that has been hanging over our heads for some time now. BBC's decision is a lesson learned but is in no way some sort of sign that Microformats is on it's way out. Thoughts from the community? Anybody else blogging about this? -- manu -- Manu Sporny President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: Blacksburg BarCamp 1.0 http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/05/15/blacksburg-barcamp-10/ _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss