However, lots and lots of Rails apps have the idea of people,
places and events, for example, and at the moment there are
thousands of developers constructing their own schemas for these.
In the microformat world, we have some nice, tested default
schemas for these that come with very tangible external benefits -
interoperation with Outlook, iCal and so on.
Could building higher-level abstractions for these common
datatypes into Rails be advantageous?
If I have my terminology correct, would this be appropriate for a
Rails Engine?
http://rails-engines.org/
Engines are only needed if you need to abstract controllers and
views, which I think is a bad idea to do on a grand scale any way.
And in this case, it's definitely unnecessary. So a regular plugin
would be what's needed.
I do, however, don't really believe in having high-level components
like Person or Address. Often, their implementation is widely
dependent on the application. Even if its possible to ALSO present
them in the form that microformats want.
So I think the road to microformats is still through mapping. I don't
see the benefits yet being so powerful that they get to call the
shots in domain modeling, but that may well depend on your situation.
So if you feel that its the case for you, I'd be happy to see
experiments in that way.
But in summary: Get a plugin going for this. That's how the new REST
support got its start (Simply Restful).
--
David Heinemeier Hansson
http://www.37signals.com -- Basecamp, Backpack, Writeboard, Tada
http://www.rubyonrails.com -- Web-application framework
http://www.loudthinking.com -- Broadcasting Brain
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