[microformats-discuss] Developer Adoption

[Ryan King]

On Jul 13, 2005, at 4:08 PM, Andy Hume wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> Sorry to interrupt the heavy spec brainstorming going on here (it  
> makes my evening train journey's fly by ;)) but I'd like to run  
> something by you guys.
>
> My thoughts are increasingly turning to getting some of the more  
> refined formats (ie, hcal, ical, hreview, etc) into the minds of  
> the real world developers out there. It's all very well them coming  
> along to mf.org, but so many of them are not understanding what  
> this is all about. They're lost in the noise of some pretty  
> exciting, but daunting 'speccy' talk.
>
> IMHO these early formats will be the key to encouraging developer  
> uptake because they work here and now, and can be useful in a real  
> world way. Do we need a developer adoption drive?

Yes and no. To some degree, its already happening without an explicit  
drive pushing it. On the other hand, education and evangelism is  
always helpful.

And there's nothing holding anyone back from doing this on their own.  
I know Tantek and I both regularly email people suggesting that they  
implement a specific microformat on their site.

> I run a developer site called UsableType (http://usabletype.com),  
> (which unfortunately, due to work has had a near 6 month hiatus -  
> but still appears to have hundreds of feed subscribers) and I am  
> currently writing a piece for it regarding microformats and more  
> specifically the hcard format. It is very basic stuff - but the  
> crux of it is showing how hcard can be useful *now* (mainly through  
> X2V), and something of a 'call to action' encouraging designers/ 
> developers top spare the 10 minutes it would take to add their  
> contact details to an hcard on their blogs/portfolio's home page.
>
> What are your feelings on this? And what specific mark-up example  
> do you believe would be appropriate for this?

hCalendar makes for good examples, too, because many sites are  
already publishing events, so it would only be a matter of adding  
some structured, semantic markup.

> Would <address class="vcard"> be an appropriate way of declaring an  
> hcard as specifically the authors details? And would it best be  
> located just once on the home page, or on every page in the footer?

Yes, that's great.

> Thoughts on this, and in general, are appreciated.


Also, there's a microformats-dev list, which is for people that have  
implementations using microformats (see http://microformats.org/ 
discuss/).

-ryan