[microformats-discuss] xFolk (RC1) and Topic Maps

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 8/10/05 10:41 AM, "Ryan King" <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:

> On Aug 10, 2005, at 9:18 AM, Bud Gibson wrote:
>> On Aug 10, 2005, at 12:09, Ryan King wrote:
>>> Actually, if you'll notice, xFolk is a proper subset of hReview
>>> (http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview), which has a field for the
>>> reviewer.
>>> 
>>> Chances are, if you need something that xFolk can't supply (and
>>> its kept simple on purpose), then its time to upgrade to hReview. :)
>> 
>> This might well work, but there is a use case where it breaks.
>> What I think Rob is getting at is the case where you harvest
>> bookmarks from a bunch of sites.  They are not reviews, just
>> bookmarks.
> 
> Please don't let the names of the formats get in the way. Just
> because its a "bookmark" and "not a review" doesn't mean that hReview
> is not the appropriate markup. I think hReview has the semantics
> needed to do what needs to be done.

Precisely.

In fact, Mike Sippey of Six Apart (one of the co-authors of hReview)
insisted specifically that hReview be able to express *all* the semantics
(optional or not) of a delicious tagged/described bookmark, thus hReview by
design can represent stand-alone delicious items including all the
properties expressed here.

The key here is that of problem and usage space.

xFolk is designed to provide the simplest minimum necessary to satisfy the
use cases that have been found of doing distributed link-tagging.

Bud did some *very* diligent and thorough research on this, and thus xFolk
very precisely represents existing behavior on blogs and websites in general
for this phenomenon.

Similarly, hReview is based on lots of research of online reviews.  One
thing we discovered is that to many people there was a lot of overlap
between reviewing a web site (or URL), and tagging/describing it, so yes,
hReview *can* do that as well, *if* you need all that expressiveness.

My advice is to first try to use xFolk.  If you find you *need* extra bits
of information "about" the item, you'll likely find them in hReview.  If you
don't, please point to the actual use cases and examples in the wild which
are driving the need and we can all take a look.

Thanks,

Tantek