[uf-discuss] hAtom and blog-post-* need some more work

[David Janes -- BlogMatrix]

I don't even have the slightest idea how to respond to this. I've been
working on hAtom since August (hardly a rush), constantly soliciting
feedback, documenting progress and descions, recently providing code, 
and so forth. Now suddenly a new there's some new microformat principles 
-- not appearing on the Wiki in any obvious place or (particularly) the 
process page.

I have no issue renaming elements in hAtom, as long as there's a
microformats process that I'm actually following -- something that I've
seriously attempt to do since the second week I've been on this list. 
I'm assuming the process is driven by documentation and discussion, and 
not by personality.

David

PS. Does someone want to fill in the RSS feed structure? It's basically 
the same as Atom, with different terminology.

Tantek Çelik wrote:
> Though I definitely understand (and applaud) the eagerness to get an hAtom
> format defined, things have definitely been rushed a bit, and there are
> holes in the background research necessary to do a good job. Holes which, if
> they were filled, would most likely result in quite a few changes to the
> hAtom proposal.
> 
> 
> For example:
> 
> http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-post-formats
> 
> 1. The formats page has yet to describe "basic structure of an RSS
> document".  This is a glaring hole.  Given how much more established RSS 2.0
> is over Atom in the space of "syndication", it needs to be taken a lot more
> seriously than that.
> 
> 2. The formats page omits another old "blog post" standard - VJOURNAL.  I
> believe Outlook supports VJOURNAL, and if so, greatly outnumbers all RSS
> readers combined.  I've at least added a starter section for VJOURNAL:
> 
> http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-post-formats#VJOURNAL
> 
> 
> One of the larger points here to consider is:
> 
> Just because other standards keep inventing new terms for the same thing,
> doesn't mean we should.
> 
> Who knows why they invented new terms?  The simplest explanation is that
> they just didn't know any better.  Did they do as much research into
> existing standards? If so, then you should be able to find URLs to that
> research which we should eagerly reuse.
> 
> We should actively AVOID inventing new terms for the same thing, even if
> those "new terms" come from other standards.
> 
> The utility of hAtom comes from the 1:1 correspondence of Atom elements to
> hAtom class names. 
> 
> This does not mean that the names have to be the same.  In fact, we should
> be preferring names from previous microformats, and even previous standards
> over new names introduced by Atom.
> 
> As long as it is made clear which hAtom class name translates into which
> Atom element name, the goal of creating a 1:1 representation of hAtom in
> XHTML is achieved.