[uf-discuss] human and author friendliness

[Jacob Ham]

On 11/9/05, Karl Dubost <karl at w3.org> wrote:
> >   I would posit that there are more HTML pages in the world
> > than Word documents.
>
> This I'm definitely not sure and I guess that's impossible to prove.
> Every companies, research center, universities I have been still rely
> heavily on Office (Open or not). The Web is not a way to work, it's a
> way to send information or to promote stuff. I think we have to be
> careful because we (geeks, Web fashionistas) live in our own cave
> with our own shadows.

Although this is a little off the topic, I disagree.  Google alone
indexes over 8 billion sites alone.  We are also not counting emails,
intranets, links with "no follow", etc.  The web is more than that you
claim it is.  It's not just a way to send information or for promoting
things.  The web is creating new uses every day, which really makes it
hard to describe exactly what it is (not what it does).

Microformats is extremely author friendly.  If you have tried to
incorporate RDF into your document or any other kinda of semantics
that is machine readable, you will understand this frustration.  While
there are no easy buttons to microformat some information (yet!), the
proposed formats makes it easy to understand and learn within 5
minutes.  Remember we still work for the machines we created!  If you
understand HTML, it is not hard to understand what Microformats are
doing.

As time goes on, Microformats will trickle down, as other web related
technologies have.  Flash, javascript, DHTML, CSS all have had the
initial speed bump. The web will age, and we will all rejoice when
most sites use vCard, hCalendar, etc.

Jake