[microformats-discuss] microformats: very low cost to publish, with many benefits

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 7/13/05 4:04 AM, "Carl Beeth" <carl.beeth at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/12/05, Joshua Porter <porter at bokardo.com> wrote:
>> In trying to understand why I should, as a developer, produce
>> microformat code,
> 
> For the same reason you produce RSS. It is a tiny investment that
> increases the value of your site.
> Right now microformats are pre early adopters stage but my hunch it is
> going to spread faster than RSS did.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter>

Carl, that is an excellent characterization of what is going on.

RSS took nearly 10 years to become widely adopted.

We don't have that kind of patience. :)

Our goal with microformats is to design them according to current publisher
behaviors, rather than trying to make publishers learn a new language,
generate separate files etc.

By lowering the barrier to entry for publishers, from a purely economic
perspective, microformats gain a much more rapid adoption curve than other
efforts which ask the publisher to do a lot more.

In fact, even just as I personally have been seeing it, their adoption has
outpaced my ability to keep up with it.  Hence those of us early pioneers in
microformats build microformats.org to provide a place for the community to
grow itself, with guiding input as needed.

Getting back to the original question.

The answer to why is that the cost of adopting microformats for publishers
is so low (literally minutes to at most an hour or two of a single
developer's time) that nearly *any* level of benefit makes it worth it, and
there are numerous such benefits already for each microformat.

Tantek