[microformats-dev] Re: [microformats-discuss] Profiles status

[Danny Ayers]

On 10/10/05, brian suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> wrote:

> --- OK, i don't quite follow the last bit, but here's what i do/did in
> my implementation. I get an HTML page and parse out the profile
> attribute values. Those are URLs to the XMDPs (they don't have to be
> XMDPs, that was never specific by the spec[1], it is just that XMDPs are
> currently the only way to describe these things in the wild).

Well, there are the GRDDL profiles as well, but long term I guess
we're looking at a single profile doc covering both requirements (as
DanC has done for data-view).

Those
> XMDPs are fetched and run through an XSLT that actually generated XSLTs
> (this has been subsequently cached, so once an XSLT has been built for a
> XMDP, there is no need to use more bandwidth for the same thing). Then
> the HTML page is tested against each XSLT (the one generated by the
> orginal XMDP from the profile page). That simply gives a result of what
> it finds on the page, no validation is done.

Neat.

This is because, you and i
> know that DTSTART is a date-time, but the machine has no way to extract
> that information from the english-prose in the XMDP.

Right - but didn't I see mention of using <abbr> to enable ISO dates
somewhere? That should be fairly machine-readable. (I've obviously got
more human reading to do...)

> So in the long run, each XMDP will need a man-made XSLT (or other
> validator). I think under the current system, there is no way to make a
> universal validator (which is fine by me).

Hmm, maybe. Depends on those patterns...

> There are things that could be added to the XMDP to make it more machine
> friendly, additional information like TYPES (date-time, string, integer,
> etc), but then we are re-inventing XML-Schema and we want to avoid that!

Right, I don't think it would be desirable to go down that path. I
must admit I'm not all that sure of the value of XMDP docs as
currently defined - they're not-quite human readable, not-quite
machine readable. But as they are being (/will be) defined for the
microformats then in makes sense to try and use them.

When I get a minute I'll have a look at the instance-driven generation
I mentioned (but didn't explain very well). A first step might be to
transform a sample microformat doc into an XMDP doc (with
placeholders/boilerplate for descriptions etc). Then that might be
usable to generate an approximate microformat2rdfxml.xsl.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com