[uf-discuss] generic microformat parsing heuristics?

[brian suda]

To build a generic microformat parse, you would first need to build a
generic XMDP parser. Before you can parse the XHTML and find property
names, you need to get what and where to look, from the XMDP. I started
to work on a universal XMDP parser, but ran into problems. This is an
old discussion from the list[1,2]. If you have further specific
questions, look through the archives and if it is not there, then post a
message. I know there is a formula to encode RDF in XHTML that uses a
slightly different style than microformats way to find and encode data.

-brian

[1] -
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-August/000729.html
[2] -
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-July/000328.html

Phil Dawes wrote:

> Hi Tantek,
>
> Tantek Çelik wrote:
>
> > Phil,
> >
> > Take a look at hCard parsing:
> >
> >  http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing
> >
> > Much of which is embodied there generalizes to other microformats.
> >
>
> Excellent - many thanks.
>
> Out of interest, do you think that a generic microformats parser _can_
> be written?
> (e.g. something that could parse hcard, hcal et al out of xhtml without
> prior knowledge of their precise schemas?)
>
> I ask because we're starting to wonder about embedding our own internal
> microformats into webapps at work[1] (e.g. maybe for financial reference
> data), but we'd want to be able to use off-the-shelf generic tools to
> parse, aggregate and query the custom data.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Phil
>
> [1] http://www.drkw.com/
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