On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:29:48 -0400 Stephen Paul Weber <singpol...@singpolyma.net> wrote:
> Having written significant code both in-browser and out to parse > microformats, I find the claim that parsing them using the DOM is > "not practical" shocking. What would you prefer? Parsing microformats via the DOM is not practical. Parsing them any other way is even worse though. While writing DOM code to parse a particular site's implementation of say, hCard, is pretty trivial, generalising that to support all the variations of how hCard is marked up in the wild is a lot of work. As a comparison, I have written Perl parsers[*] for microformats, RDFa and Microdata. Here are the lines-of-code counts for each, excluding documentation, comments and blank lines: Microdata : 945 RDFa 1.0 : 1265 RDFa 1.1 [**] : 2611 microformats : 9455 * = See <http://search.cpan.org/~tobyink/>. ** = this code actually handles both RDFa 1.0 and 1.1. Whatsmore it can handle them embedded in Atom, SVG and OpenDocument Format; not just (X)HTML. A pure RDFa-1.1-in-(X)HTML parser could probably be written in under 1000 lines of Perl. The amount of code needed to parse microformats is clearly different from the other formats. Another difference is that the Microdata and RDFa 1.0 implementations can be considered more-or-less complete. (The RDFa 1.1 working drafts are still somewhat is flux, so the implementation no doubt still needs changes.) If somebody comes up tomorrow with a new RDFa or Microdata vocabulary for describing cows, or bread makers, or train timetables, it will work out of the box. For microformats, that's not the case - code needs to be written. So you end up with a chicken-and-egg situation with nobody implementing tools for a new draft microformat because it's not used in the wild; nobody using it in the wild because of a lack of tool support; and the microformat never progressing beyond draft status because of lack of implementation experience, and uncertainty about how it might work in the wild. That's why we haven't had any of the draft microformats on the wiki move out of draft status in the last four years or so; or at least it's a major contributory factor. -- Toby A Inkster <mailto:m...@tobyinkster.co.uk> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk> _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss