[uf-discuss] Hello / Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)

Tue Nov 8 14:27:02 PST 2005

Le 05-11-07 à 11:51, Tantek Çelik a écrit :
>> Disambiguation of names
>> (attribute values) within a document is achieved through (for want of
>> a better phrase) Intelligent Design, i.e. the 'approved' microformats
>> are constructed with the prior intention that naming clashes won't
>> happen.
>
> A better way of putting this is that the disambiguation is achieved  
> through
> the social design of having a *very* open community (microformats.org)

being a very open community, unfortunately doesn't necessary address  
universality. I wish it was another way. But yes the openness is a  
key and an advantage.

> which
> is imminently findable by anyone else doing work in the area on the  
> Web
> (this would not have been possible 10 years ago), and whose principles
> explicitly forbid reinvention or duplication of formats and explicitly
> encourage reuse of microformats as building blocks.

Which is the goal of any kind of efforts of standardization out  
there. :)

>> Disambiguation on the Web at large is achieved through the use
>> of profile URI(s), (<head profile="htttp://...">), effectively
>> namespacing the vocabulary in a lightweight, authoring-friendly
>> fashion.
>
> Yes, Danny's right.  Though we depend on the social construct of
> microformats to avoid such problems in practice, microformats also  
> use XMDP
> profiles to explicitly define vocabularies for formats. And XMDP's  
> URLs for
> specifying terms is compatible with those used by RDF, with "#term"  
> at the
> end.  This is by design, and was one of the earliest examples of
> microformats reusing a convention from another format as it were.

May I disagree but in a gentle way ;) More pushing forward than  
disagreeing in fact. I think microformats as HTML are not author  
friendly. The only way to make that _really_ friendly is to have  
template engines to edit the content and not see the source code. For  
example, the good thing when I use my Address Book application is  
that I don't have to view the coding behind. Binary, XML, whatever is  
the encoding is not my issue, as long as I can type in these little  
form the information.

The chance for microformats (and RDF in general) is to have engines  
implementing well defined "schemas". A web site has disappeared  
unfortunately, I should have taken a screenshot. It was a tool to  
conceive blogging templates so you don't have to type values.
     http://reger.com/biz/what-is-datablogging.log

I guess XForms could be a solution to define such templates or maybe  
something using XUL, or both combined.  We are yet very far from the  
friendliness, but I guess it's a big step forward.

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***