On 25 August 2010 13:00, Marnen Laibow-Koser <[email protected]> wrote: > Colin Law wrote: > [...] >> it is an >> overlying convention using field names to indicate the type and >> structure of the data. > > In a sense, that's *always* what field names do. > >> In that sense it is akin to the microformat >> concept. > > That I do not agree with at all. I'm trying to see the similarity, and > -- past the most trivial level -- I do not.
>From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat: 'A microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF) is a web-based approach to semantic markup which seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata[1] and other attributes in web pages and other contexts that support (X)HTML, such as RSS.' >From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic: 'Semantics is the study of meaning. It typically focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for.' So I interpret 'semantic markup' to be markup that indicates in some sense the meaning of the data. >From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata: 'Metadata is loosely defined as data about data. Metadata is a concept that applies mainly to electronically archived or presented data and is used to describe the a) definition, b) structure and c) administration of data files with all contents in context to ease the use of the captured and archived data for further use.' So the example where a field name of person[address][street_address] indicates that field content is the street address part of an address for a person seems to me could arguably fall into the definition of microformat as it is markup that provides some information about both the meaning and the structure of the data. Colin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
