[microformats-discuss] UA requirements for microformats

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> 
> 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.

The problem with the rapid adoption is that since the specs don't yet have 
exact UA conformance requirements (e.g. how to process an HTML document to 
turn it back into an iCalendar data structure) we're going to end up in 
the same tag soup mess that HTML UAs ended up in: UAs are going to have to 
be reverse-engineering each other to determine how to parse the data.

This IMHO is the single most important problem facing microformats today, 
and is the second biggest problem stopping microformats being adopted in 
the HTML5 specs. (The primary reason is I haven't had the time to get 
around to working on those parts of the spec yet.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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