[microformats-discuss] Hello & blog post format

[Geoffrey Glass]

Hello,

I just joined the list.  The archive seems to be down or non-existent, 
so you'll have to forgive me if I haven't a clue.

I am interested in a microformat for blog and forum posts.  I have been 
working on an web annotation tool for web forums which needs to be able 
to find individual posts in a discussion forum in order to annotate them 
and record metadata (title, author, post date, permalink).  I found 
myself moving towards microformat-style markup, then discovered this 
effort.

Another part of the project is collecting metadata along with content 
when a user perfoms a copy-paste operation from a post.  So, for 
example, the copy operation could automatically prefix with the title, 
author, and date of the post.  For example:

 From Online Discussion in Education by Cindy Xin on 16 June 2005:
Online discussion in education is a paradox.

I see the current discussion about RelSource addresses how this should 
be formatted.  My main concern is with how to extract the title, author, 
etc. in the first place.  I have a Javascript hack which does this 
automatically on Firefox, but it's a nasty hack.  A clean solution 
requires a browser extension - which would be relatively useless without 
a standard.

It may clarify to show what I'm doing at the moment.  The class names 
(post excepted) match tag names in the Atom spec. T is any tag:

<T class="post" id="id">
 <T class="title">title</T>
 <T class="author>author name</T>
 <abbr class="created" title="iso date">human-readable date</abbr>
 <a href="permalink">...</a>
 <T class="content">post body</T>
</T>

The other major use I have been thinking about has probably been 
discussed.  Search engines can't discover metadata that has expired from 
RSS or Atom syndication feeds, but which is still present on the web in 
X/HTML pages.  A post format would provide that metadata.

My annotation and context-sensitive copy work is at 
http://www.geof.net/code/annotation/, my blog includes some discussion 
of the issues at http://www.geof.net/blog/category/annotation.

Geof