An example of an XML fragment

XML Schema Datatype	Mac OS X tag	XHTML class/tag
xs:string	`<string>`	implicit
xs:integer	`<integer>`	`<div class="integer"></div>`

XML Schema Datatype	Mac OS X tag	XHTML class/tag
xs:string	`<string>`	implicit
xs:integer	`<integer>`	`<div class="integer"></div>`

XML Schema Datatype	Mac OS X tag	XHTML class/tag
xs:string	`<string>`	implicit
xs:integer	`<integer>`	`<div class="integer"></div>`

instead of

etc.? And the nervous laughter that followed made it quite clear this is acknowledged as a common mistake (ironically, the same mistake that the writers of that aforementioned article made). > 1. I attribute this gap in our practice to the fact that we're still > recovering from presentational tables. Indeed. This is one of the reasons I decided it was about time we started talking out loud about "semantic tables" and used it as a new example in the update to "The Elements of Meaningful XHTML". http://tantek.com/presentations/2005/09/elements-of-xhtml/ Thanks, Tantek From molly at molly.com Sun Oct 2 13:49:07 2005 From: molly at molly.com (Molly Holzschlag) Date: Sun Oct 2 13:49:19 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] On Digital Web Article and Educating Others (was Web 2.0: Abused) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've been wanting an opportunity to pipe up and say hello to everyone, and the comments on the Digital Web article provide a good opportunity to do just that. Many people here know me but for those that don't, I am an author and educator, Group Lead of the Web Standards Project, and an invited expert to the W3C Internationalization GEO group where I work on outreach and relationships in the internationalization area. I believe in this case the authors have good intentions, and as the general readership of the Digital Web audience is mostly IA and design folks, that's why we end up with Tantek's assessment that this particular article could have been written years ago. That certainly makes sense to a lot of people here, but not all writers and educators are great technologists, or understand the lay of the land as the more progressive and visionary folks do. I'm certainly in that category, and I'm sure that's a lot of the reason Tantek has always reached out to me - so I can improve my understanding and skills in order to make the concepts and practices more approachable to a variety of skillsets. While constructive criticism is one way to handle this sort of thing and ignoring it is another, I believe that drawing the people into the community is even better if it's possible to do, and in this case it is. It's especially important when writers are putting information out there because educating them (as I am being educated and corrected every day) makes a better product for the masses who visit sites of this nature and don't have the depth of skill, experience and technical savvy as so many of the readership here does. Ignoring them should only occur when they turn into complete asshats and are unapproachable, and we know who those folks are, or rapidly find out. Where I can contribute something here is to help improve the good info > writer/educator > developer flow. I happen to know one of the authors - Joshua Porter. He works for User Interface Engineering (Jared Spool's company in Cambridge, Mass) and only learned to write XHTML and CSS within the past two years, when he first attended a session Eric Meyer and I taught at their UI Conference. We'll be presenting that session in less than two week's time, so I think great way to help shift perspectives into more contemporary thinking and more practical articles and information to get people on track is to reach out. That said, I'll do just that, and an invitation to join a list such as this would be great. Another way to help is for those of us writing and speaking and training from the outside in as well as from within companies and organizations is to start pushing some of the materials more aggressively. Again, one way to do this is to bring people into the fold who are open to this. Bottom line is that I don't want to see people who are doing education and outreach to very broad audiences be ignored or criticized if instead they can be educated, which in turn is good for everyone and all our common goals. Molly Molly E. Holzschlag Author / Instructor / Web Designer About Me: http://www.molly.com/ About Web Standards: http://www.webstandards.org/ About W3C GEO Working Group: http://www.w3.org/International/geo/ From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com Sun Oct 2 14:01:49 2005 From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix) Date: Sun Oct 2 14:01:53 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] XHTML tables as CSV-like "records"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43404ABD.3050603@blogmatrix.com> Just in partial defense of people who do this, the reason (I think) this happens is that pre-existing tags such as

bring a lot of _presentation_ baggage to to the table; the simplest -- though by no means the best obviously -- is to simply route around the issue. I know from personal experience trying to use

* because that's what I mean semantically in a presentation friendly manner is even uglier. The beautiful thing about XHTML-centric microformats is that presentation and meaning are (mostly) freely intermixed without requiring major sacrifices on the part of the content provider. Perhaps a repository of advice relating to this issue is needed? Regards, etc... David http://www.blogmatrix.com Tantek ?elik wrote: > > I used the example during my last talk at WE05 of -- how many of you have > seen or written markup like: > >

> > instead of > >

> > etc.? > > And the nervous laughter that followed made it quite clear this is > acknowledged as a common mistake (ironically, the same mistake that the > writers of that aforementioned article made). From ryan at technorati.com Sun Oct 2 15:24:23 2005 From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King) Date: Sun Oct 2 15:24:28 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] On Digital Web Article and Educating Others (was Web 2.0: Abused) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Molly- I'm so glad you're here. I somehow didn't realize you were on the list. Your analysis below is great. I think we (myself especially) can be rather myopic, assuming that others' have the same technical background and experience. I think we also treat others as adversaries, where it would be more productive to treat them as "opportunities for education" or "opportunities for community building." I know there's several people on this list (and they probably know who they are) that I was, at one point, tempted to treat as *adversaries,* but who I now count as friends and collaborators. -ryan On Oct 2, 2005, at 1:49 PM, Molly Holzschlag wrote: > I've been wanting an opportunity to pipe up and say hello to > everyone, and > the comments on the Digital Web article provide a good opportunity > to do > just that. > > Many people here know me but for those that don't, I am an author and > educator, Group Lead of the Web Standards Project, and an invited > expert to > the W3C Internationalization GEO group where I work on outreach and > relationships in the internationalization area. > > I believe in this case the authors have good intentions, and as the > general > readership of the Digital Web audience is mostly IA and design > folks, that's > why we end up with Tantek's assessment that this particular article > could > have been written years ago. > > That certainly makes sense to a lot of people here, but not all > writers and > educators are great technologists, or understand the lay of the > land as the > more progressive and visionary folks do. I'm certainly in that > category, and > I'm sure that's a lot of the reason Tantek has always reached out > to me - so > I can improve my understanding and skills in order to make the > concepts and > practices more approachable to a variety of skillsets. > > While constructive criticism is one way to handle this sort of > thing and > ignoring it is another, I believe that drawing the people into the > community > is even better if it's possible to do, and in this case it is. It's > especially important when writers are putting information out there > because > educating them (as I am being educated and corrected every day) > makes a > better product for the masses who visit sites of this nature and > don't have > the depth of skill, experience and technical savvy as so many of the > readership here does. Ignoring them should only occur when they > turn into > complete asshats and are unapproachable, and we know who those > folks are, or > rapidly find out. > > Where I can contribute something here is to help improve the good > info > > writer/educator > developer flow. > > I happen to know one of the authors - Joshua Porter. He works for > User > Interface Engineering (Jared Spool's company in Cambridge, Mass) > and only > learned to write XHTML and CSS within the past two years, when he > first > attended a session Eric Meyer and I taught at their UI Conference. > We'll be > presenting that session in less than two week's time, so I think > great way > to help shift perspectives into more contemporary thinking and more > practical articles and information to get people on track is to > reach out. > That said, I'll do just that, and an invitation to join a list such > as this > would be great. > > Another way to help is for those of us writing and speaking and > training > from the outside in as well as from within companies and > organizations is to > start pushing some of the materials more aggressively. Again, one > way to do > this is to bring people into the fold who are open to this. > > Bottom line is that I don't want to see people who are doing > education and > outreach to very broad audiences be ignored or criticized if > instead they > can be educated, which in turn is good for everyone and all our common > goals. > > Molly > > Molly E. Holzschlag > Author / Instructor / Web Designer > About Me: http://www.molly.com/ > About Web Standards: http://www.webstandards.org/ > About W3C GEO Working Group: http://www.w3.org/International/geo/ > > > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > microformats-discuss@microformats.org > h -- Ryan King ryan@technorati.com From ryan at technorati.com Sun Oct 2 15:30:15 2005 From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King) Date: Sun Oct 2 15:30:20 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] XHTML tables as CSV-like "records"? In-Reply-To: <43404ABD.3050603@blogmatrix.com> References: <43404ABD.3050603@blogmatrix.com> Message-ID: <489C9773-D068-45DF-A85A-05BEDA32593A@technorati.com> On Oct 2, 2005, at 2:01 PM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote: > Just in partial defense of people who do this, the reason (I think) > this happens is that pre-existing tags such as

bring a lot of > _presentation_ baggage to to the table; the simplest -- though by > no means the best obviously -- is to simply route around the issue. > I know from personal experience trying to use

* because > that's what I mean semantically in a presentation friendly manner > is even uglier. An understandable defense, for sure. No one is claiming that semantic markup is easy or free, but there are certainly other ways to *work around* the issue. See, for example, http://tantek.com/log/2005/ undohtml.css where tantek un-applies a bunch of default styles. > The beautiful thing about XHTML-centric microformats is that > presentation and meaning are (mostly) freely intermixed without > requiring major sacrifices on the part of the content provider. > > Perhaps a repository of advice relating to this issue is needed? If you're looking for help on CSS, the css-discuss list[http:// www.css-discuss.org/] (and accompanying wiki) is awesome. -ryan -- Ryan King ryan@technorati.com From tantek at cs.stanford.edu Sun Oct 2 15:36:32 2005 From: tantek at cs.stanford.edu (Tantek =?ISO-8859-1?B?xw==?=elik) Date: Sun Oct 2 15:36:36 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] On Digital Web Article and Educating Others (was Web 2.0: Abused) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Molly and Ryan, you've both made great points. Molly, in particular, please do reach out to Joshua Porter. As someone who is focused on helping the *user* Joshua will likely find the appeal of the "humans first" approach of microformats. I've reached out to Randy Charles Morin on a number of occasions, and have had no luck. There's basically a set of "XML zealots" that actively dislike semantic (X)HTML, I'm not sure how else to put it. For these folks, I've learned that the only way to convince them is to go off and succeed with real working examples, rather than to try to spend time educating them. They don't *want* to be educated. Heck, they don't think they *need* to be educated, they think they are already experts on semantic markup (never mind that typically none of their web pages are valid). I mean, if anyone does want to spend time educating them, please, by all means do so. I've just decided that my own time is better spent making microformats succeed rather than fighting/arguing/educating XML zealots. I've already spent *plenty* of time doing in various W3C contexts to know the apparent success rate there, at least for me. Thanks, Tantek On 10/2/05 3:24 PM, "Ryan King" wrote: > Molly- > > I'm so glad you're here. I somehow didn't realize you were on the list. > > Your analysis below is great. I think we (myself especially) can be > rather myopic, assuming that others' have the same technical > background and experience. I think we also treat others as > adversaries, where it would be more productive to treat them as > "opportunities for education" or "opportunities for community building." > > I know there's several people on this list (and they probably know > who they are) that I was, at one point, tempted to treat as > *adversaries,* but who I now count as friends and collaborators. > > -ryan > > On Oct 2, 2005, at 1:49 PM, Molly Holzschlag wrote: > >> I've been wanting an opportunity to pipe up and say hello to >> everyone, and >> the comments on the Digital Web article provide a good opportunity >> to do >> just that. >> >> Many people here know me but for those that don't, I am an author and >> educator, Group Lead of the Web Standards Project, and an invited >> expert to >> the W3C Internationalization GEO group where I work on outreach and >> relationships in the internationalization area. >> >> I believe in this case the authors have good intentions, and as the >> general >> readership of the Digital Web audience is mostly IA and design >> folks, that's >> why we end up with Tantek's assessment that this particular article >> could >> have been written years ago. >> >> That certainly makes sense to a lot of people here, but not all >> writers and >> educators are great technologists, or understand the lay of the >> land as the >> more progressive and visionary folks do. I'm certainly in that >> category, and >> I'm sure that's a lot of the reason Tantek has always reached out >> to me - so >> I can improve my understanding and skills in order to make the >> concepts and >> practices more approachable to a variety of skillsets. >> >> While constructive criticism is one way to handle this sort of >> thing and >> ignoring it is another, I believe that drawing the people into the >> community >> is even better if it's possible to do, and in this case it is. It's >> especially important when writers are putting information out there >> because >> educating them (as I am being educated and corrected every day) >> makes a >> better product for the masses who visit sites of this nature and >> don't have >> the depth of skill, experience and technical savvy as so many of the >> readership here does. Ignoring them should only occur when they >> turn into >> complete asshats and are unapproachable, and we know who those >> folks are, or >> rapidly find out. >> >> Where I can contribute something here is to help improve the good >> info > >> writer/educator > developer flow. >> >> I happen to know one of the authors - Joshua Porter. He works for >> User >> Interface Engineering (Jared Spool's company in Cambridge, Mass) >> and only >> learned to write XHTML and CSS within the past two years, when he >> first >> attended a session Eric Meyer and I taught at their UI Conference. >> We'll be >> presenting that session in less than two week's time, so I think >> great way >> to help shift perspectives into more contemporary thinking and more >> practical articles and information to get people on track is to >> reach out. >> That said, I'll do just that, and an invitation to join a list such >> as this >> would be great. >> >> Another way to help is for those of us writing and speaking and >> training >> from the outside in as well as from within companies and >> organizations is to >> start pushing some of the materials more aggressively. Again, one >> way to do >> this is to bring people into the fold who are open to this. >> >> Bottom line is that I don't want to see people who are doing >> education and >> outreach to very broad audiences be ignored or criticized if >> instead they >> can be educated, which in turn is good for everyone and all our common >> goals. >> >> Molly >> >> Molly E. Holzschlag >> Author / Instructor / Web Designer >> About Me: http://www.molly.com/ >> About Web Standards: http://www.webstandards.org/ >> About W3C GEO Working Group: http://www.w3.org/International/geo/ >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> microformats-discuss mailing list >> microformats-discuss@microformats.org >> h > > -- > Ryan King > ryan@technorati.com > > > > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > microformats-discuss@microformats.org > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss From luke.arno at gmail.com Sun Oct 2 16:18:53 2005 From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno) Date: Sun Oct 2 16:18:56 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] XHTML tables as CSV-like "records"? In-Reply-To: <43404ABD.3050603@blogmatrix.com> References: <43404ABD.3050603@blogmatrix.com> Message-ID: On 10/2/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote: > Just in partial defense of people who do this, the reason (I think) this > happens is that pre-existing tags such as

bring a lot of > _presentation_ baggage to to the table; the simplest -- though by no > means the best obviously -- is to simply route around the issue. I know > from personal experience trying to use

* because that's what I > mean semantically in a presentation friendly manner is even uglier. > I feel your pain. Often the default styles provided by web browsers require some undoing. It would not be so difficult to write a stylesheet to give us more of a tabula rasa (as with styling Atom feeds and so forth.) I have a sense that this would create more work than it would eliminate. Perhaps there is a compromise: a "base" stylesheet that could provide defaults more appropriate to a more semantic breed of XHTML documents, especially those containing microformats. Is anyone else interested in this? Is there already anything like this? - Luke From luke.arno at gmail.com Sun Oct 2 16:21:23 2005 From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno) Date: Sun Oct 2 16:21:25 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] XHTML tables as CSV-like "records"? In-Reply-To: References: <43404ABD.3050603@blogmatrix.com> Message-ID: On 10/2/05, Luke Arno wrote: > On 10/2/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote: > > Just in partial defense of people who do this, the reason (I think) this > > happens is that pre-existing tags such as

bring a lot of > > _presentation_ baggage to to the table; the simplest -- though by no > > means the best obviously -- is to simply route around the issue. I know > > from personal experience trying to use

* because that's what I > > mean semantically in a presentation friendly manner is even uglier. > > > > I feel your pain. Often the default styles provided by web browsers require > some undoing. It would not be so difficult to write a stylesheet to give us > more of a tabula rasa (as with styling Atom feeds and so forth.) I have a > sense that this would create more work than it would eliminate. Perhaps > there is a compromise: a "base" stylesheet that could provide defaults > more appropriate to a more semantic breed of XHTML documents, > especially those containing microformats. > > Is anyone else interested in this? Is there already anything like this? > > - Luke > Never mind. Ryan already answered this while I was writing my message. I should have known that Tantek already did this. ;-] - Luke From marius.scurtescu at gmail.com Sun Oct 2 16:50:40 2005 From: marius.scurtescu at gmail.com (Marius Scurtescu) Date: Sun Oct 2 16:50:44 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] microformats for partial info Message-ID: Hi, I have a practical question regarding microformats for partially showing content. I am looking at adding microformats markup to an existing Xoops calendar module. Adding the markup to pages where the whole event is showing is pretty simple, but I am not sure what to do with partially showing events. The module has blocks for showing coming events, these blocks will shown a short version with a link to the event page. The same applies to search results. Is there a generic/preferred solution for this issue? Thanks, Marius -- http://marius.scurtescu.com From brian.suda at gmail.com Sun Oct 2 17:46:11 2005 From: brian.suda at gmail.com (Brian Suda) Date: Sun Oct 2 17:46:14 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] microformats for partial info In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <21e770780510021746x1824024bta21fba41be823dee@mail.gmail.com> Could you send an example or a link? If the partical information is not the minimum required for a VEVENT, then i'd say don't mark it up, otherwise, you can it if you want? it is a trade-off, either not encode anything and the user never knows about the event, or only encode half the information so the user only gets half the story... it is a trade-off that only you can determine for the users... I think a link or example would help, then we can try to work through this together. -brian On 10/2/05, Marius Scurtescu wrote: > Hi, > > I have a practical question regarding microformats for partially > showing content. > > I am looking at adding microformats markup to an existing Xoops > calendar module. Adding the markup to pages where the whole event is > showing is pretty simple, but I am not sure what to do with partially > showing events. The module has blocks for showing coming events, these > blocks will shown a short version with a link to the event page. The > same applies to search results. > > Is there a generic/preferred solution for this issue? > > Thanks, > Marius > > > -- > http://marius.scurtescu.com > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > microformats-discuss@microformats.org > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss > -- brian suda http://suda.co.uk From pilgrim at gmail.com Sun Oct 2 20:44:51 2005 From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim) Date: Sun Oct 2 20:44:57 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] relLicense parser Message-ID: <14be96d30510022044n1c899725na209b1ccb461dd7e@mail.gmail.com> Didn't see anything like this out there, so... http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/rellicense/licenseexplorer.user.js Attempts to parse rel="license" links on web pages and logs the license information to the JavaScript Console. Recognizes most common licenses, including some variations in license URLs. -- Cheers, -Mark From drernie at opendarwin.org Sun Oct 2 21:17:38 2005 From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar) Date: Sun Oct 2 21:17:49 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] XHTML tables as CSV-like "records"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org> Hi Tantek et al, On Oct 2, 2005, at 1:30 PM, Tantek ?elik wrote: > Right. Before jumping to a microformat, we should always first > ask, can I > "just" use XHTML elements to do this? And if not, can I create a > simple > XHTML compound to do this? I'm not sure I understand the distinction being made (I'm still trying to figure out the terminology, I guess). I appreciated all the comments, but the most relevant for me was Kevin's: On Oct 2, 2005, at 12:00 PM, Kevin Marks wrote: > This is something we discussed last year in 'Can your website be > your API?', > > http://tantek.com/presentations/20040928sdforumws/semantic-xhtml.html > > I think it is worth writing out a set of rules, as we did for XOXO. > In particular, XOXO constrains each

to one

for > simplicitly of dictionary mapping, and constraining to have a > uniform grid of rows and columns makes sense. > > You can represent n=dimensional arrays in XOXO as nested lists, but > a 2d table is a very useful special case. That is precisely my point. I want to know: a) How -best- to use *existing* XHTML table markup to indicate that idea of a nested list (or list of dictionaries) As (I think) Ryan said: On Oct 2, 2005, at 11:33 AM, Ryan King wrote: > the talk also discusses some of > the lesser know attributes already build into tables, such as AXIS, > HEADER, COLGROUP, ROWGROUP, ID, etc[1]. Even some of the regular > elements, TBODY, TH, etc. These already have some semantic meaning, so > a new microformat might not be needed for this application Yes, I'm pretty sure we don't need new markup *inside* the table -- the existing semantics should work fine. However, I *do* think we need conventions about *which* semantic elements to use, and how to interpret them. For example, should "scope" always be explicitly specified? Should we expect *all* conforming tables to have a header row (using )? Or, how do the semantics change if a given element is or is not present (e.g., does it become a 'tuple' instead of a 'dictionary' if there's no headers?). Which brings me to my second point b) What differentiates a microformat from a design pattern from an HTML compound? Is it just the presence of a class name? In this case -- as at least Kevin seems to agree, even if nobody else does -- doesn't it make as much sense to have a unique classname for structured tables, analogous to "xoxo" for lists? To show that the conventions *are* being followed? Or is there some subtlety here I'm missing? Conversely, could we conceivable add 'table' as an element of XOXO (explicitly defined as a 'compact' representation of multiple lists)? I'm not trying to 'hurry' into anything -- I'm genuinely confused, and open to any and all suggestions. :-) Thanks, - Ernie P. From maetl at mcs.vuw.ac.nz Sun Oct 2 22:01:05 2005 From: maetl at mcs.vuw.ac.nz (Mark Rickerby) Date: Sun Oct 2 22:01:08 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] XHTML tables as CSV-like "records"? In-Reply-To: <88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org> References: <88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org> Message-ID: > b) What differentiates a microformat from a design pattern from an > HTML compound? Hi... The relationship of microformats and compounds to design patterns, is that they exist to solve a specific problem in a way that is reusable. For me, the key distinction is that microformats are community mediated standards that can be applied in a general context, wheras compounds are fixed blocks of structure that are applied in a specific context. Both are reusable, but microformats are explicitly linked to a profile, wheras compounds merely exist in context (eg: a citation might exist in the context of a blog entry). I just wrote something aimed at answering exactly this question, and hopefully dispelling some of the mistaken assumptions that have been coming up recently, regarding class attributes being the only way to express meaning: http://maetl.coretxt.net.nz/?m=xhtml-design-patterns It's a work in progress, there is obviously a lot missing, which I will hopefully fill in over the coming weeks as I learn more... AFAIK, the class=xoxo attribute is not required, for lists to be xoxo compatible. I didn't write this down, but was wondering if as well as being an elementary microformat, perhaps xoxo is the archetypal example of a semantic XHTML compound as well? Regards, Mark From nathan at twinsparc.com Sun Oct 2 22:22:19 2005 From: nathan at twinsparc.com (Nathan Steiner) Date: Sun Oct 2 22:22:23 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] Microformats in BBEdit Glossary Message-ID: # Intro I've made a little BBEdit glossary of Microformats (just hcard, hcalendar, and hreview at the moment) that I thought might be helpful to other HTMLers out there who wish to use Microformats efficiently in their workflow. To generate the code used in my snippets I used the -o-matic tools at microformats.org and inserted generic starter text (e.g. 123 address, city). The resulting glossary allows me to simply drag n' drop a microformat into my HTML and customize to my liking. ## Request for a quick review I was thinking that I'd share my little glossary for other HTMLers that like to use BBEdit, but I wanted to pass it by the experts here at this list in the hopes of avoiding any accidental sharing of bad practice or less than preferable methodology. Regardless of if you have BBEdit, the files can be opened in any text editor to see the snippet that *would* be inserted if installed. If you have BBEdit, install instructions are included in the zip. Here's where they can be retrieved (11 KB): http://twinsparc.com/_media/BBedit_Microformats.zip Thanks in advance for anyone who has the time to check this out and give me the thumbs up/down. Nate Steiner From ryan at technorati.com Sun Oct 2 22:45:21 2005 From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King) Date: Sun Oct 2 22:45:25 2005 Subject: [microformats-discuss] XHTML tables as CSV-like "records"? In-Reply-To: <88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org> References: <88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org> Message-ID: On Oct 2, 2005, at 9:17 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote: > Hi Tantek et al, > > On Oct 2, 2005, at 1:30 PM, Tantek ?elik wrote: > >> Right. Before jumping to a microformat, we should always first >> ask, can I >> "just" use XHTML elements to do this? And if not, can I create a >> simple >> XHTML compound to do this? > > I'm not sure I understand the distinction being made (I'm still > trying to figure out the terminology, I guess). I appreciated all > the comments, but the most relevant for me was Kevin's: In short: XHTML compounds are combinations of two elements to create a new construct with specific semantics. Nothing is added, only recombined. For example:

...

Combines the semantics of

 with the semantics of  to  
create a compound construct.

> On Oct 2, 2005, at 12:00 PM, Kevin Marks wrote:
>
>> This is something we discussed last year in 'Can your website be  
>> your API?',
>>
>> http://tantek.com/presentations/20040928sdforumws/semantic-xhtml.html
>>
>> I think it is worth writing out a set of rules, as we did for  
>> XOXO. In particular, XOXO constrains each  to one 
 for  
>> simplicitly of dictionary mapping, and constraining to have a  
>> uniform grid of rows and columns makes sense.
>>
>> You can represent n=dimensional arrays in XOXO as nested lists,  
>> but a 2d table is a very useful special case.
>>
>
> That is precisely my point.  I want to know:
>
> a) How -best- to use *existing* XHTML table markup to indicate that  
> idea of a nested list (or list of dictionaries)

Which is a very good question.

> As (I think) Ryan said:

I think it was Brian.

> On Oct 2, 2005, at 11:33 AM, Ryan King wrote:
>
>> the talk also discusses some of
>> the lesser know attributes already build into tables, such as AXIS,
>> HEADER, COLGROUP, ROWGROUP, ID, etc[1]. Even some of the regular
>> elements, TBODY, TH, etc. These already have some semantic  
>> meaning, so
>> a new microformat might not be needed for this application
>
> Yes, I'm pretty sure we don't need new markup *inside* the table --  
> the existing semantics should work fine.  However, I *do* think we  
> need conventions about *which* semantic elements to use, and how to  
> interpret them.  For example, should "scope" always be explicitly  
> specified?   Should we expect *all* conforming tables to have a  
> header row (using )?  Or, how do the semantics change if a  
> given element is or is not present (e.g., does it become a 'tuple'  
> instead of a 'dictionary' if there's no headers?).

These are very good questions, for which I don't think there are any  
thorough, established answers (not that people haven't addressed them  
in many contexts, but we don't have a way for doing it in a lossless- 
xhtml way).

> Which brings me to my second point
>
> b) What differentiates a microformat from a design pattern from an  
> HTML compound?
>
> Is it just the presence of a class name?   In this case -- as at  
> least Kevin seems to agree, even if nobody else does -- doesn't it  
> make as much sense to have a unique classname for structured  
> tables, analogous to "xoxo" for lists? To show that the conventions  
> *are* being followed?

I would break them up thusly:

microformat - an extension to xhtml, usually by adding a class, rel  
or rev attributes. Some specify which elements must be used (eg,  
xoxo), others don't

design pattern - good xhtml practice which emerge over time, which  
are sometimes described formally

html compound - see above

> Or is there some subtlety here I'm missing?
>
> Conversely, could we conceivable add 'table' as an element of XOXO  
> (explicitly defined as a 'compact' representation of multiple lists)?

Actually, it seems we need something like xoxo for tables:

xoxo is to outlines as ? is to tables.

> I'm not trying to 'hurry' into anything -- I'm genuinely confused,  
> and open to any and all suggestions. :-)

Your questions are good and well thought out. I hope my answers have  
been helpful.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 00:58:47 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 00:58:50 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
Message-ID: 

Tantek wrote:

> There's basically a set of "XML zealots" that actively dislike
> semantic (X)HTML, I'm not sure how else to put it.

I might be one of those individuals that you are calling an XML
zealot. I like the idea of semantic markup in XHTML but it is not
clear to me as to what (or which) problems you are trying to solve
with microformats. What type of applications and/or services do you
envision consuming these data structures? XHTML is a presentation
format so my inclination is to think that microformats will be
relegated to the domain of JavaScript.

I am looking for format definitions that are not tied to the
presentation layer so that I can effectively reuse them in the other
layers of my web application as well as within XML content
repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc.
My XHTML will not be hand generated. However, it will be generated by
end users (designers and content providers) that know nothing of
markup languages or semantics.

I have not been able to determine if my requirements are outside the
scope of what you are trying to accomplish. On the Wiki there is a
"precise" definition of microformats that includes plain XML and Atom
as containers so I was thinking that I am in the right place. However,
your about page mentions that microformats are "highly correlated with
semantic XHTML".

Then there is this recent statement...

> Not everyone has figured out that "plain" XML has failed (with the
> exceptions of RSS and XHTML) on the Web, and thus on its way down and out as
> something that is seriously considered, expect to see more and more
> desperate "last ditch" efforts to promote it like this article, and in fact,
> there will always be a few individuals pushing it.

This sort of arrogant ignorance is probably why us zealots have
difficulty taking your vision seriously.

> For these folks, I've learned that the only way to convince them is to go
> off and succeed with real working examples, rather than to try to spend time
> educating them.

A specification of an example application or service will suffice for
me. I can extrapolate the rest. All I see on the site and wiki is
rhetoric and hyperbole. If microformats is limited to structured
blogging then you have already lost me. In my opinion "Web
microcontent publishing in general" is a pretty useless definition.

> They don't *want* to be educated.  Heck, they don't think
> they *need* to be educated, they think they are already experts on semantic
> markup (never mind that typically none of their web pages are valid).

I think it is more likely that you have failed in your attempts to
educate others about what you are trying to achieve.

> I've just decided that my own time is better spent making
> microformats succeed rather than fighting/arguing/educating XML zealots.

What is your criteria for determining when you have made microformats a success?
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 02:49:34 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Mon Oct  3 02:49:38 2005
Subject: Semantics (was Re: [microformats-discuss] Web 2.0: Abused)
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510030249u141c7704s17f13e659f7c6d8e@mail.gmail.com>

On one specific point raised in that article:

"Semantic(s)" may be an ill-defined word in general, but within the
field of computers it does have fairly specific meaning - the logical
interpretation of the thing in question. The semantics of a program is
effectively how it behaves on execution; the semantics of markup is
effectivelythe abstract model of the domain of interest (and the
mapping between the syntax and that model). Most markup languages can
be mapped to fairly simple relational models.  (I'm not a logician, so
this is broad brushstrokes)

IMHO, a critical aspect of semantics on the Web is disambiguation, so
if you have a piece of markup and can deterministically interpret it
within a given model, you have semantics. Without the disambiguation,
you lose the determinism and are left with rules of thumb (scraping).
Automation (the thing computers are good at) gives way to guesswork.
Putting a string like "name" in a CSS attribute may be unambiguous in
a local system, but on the Web at large something like the profile URI
is needed to give it global semantics.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 03:19:26 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Mon Oct  3 03:19:29 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510030319j22cd9b1fj3d5a0d3652d898be@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:

 I like the idea of semantic markup in XHTML but it is not
> clear to me as to what (or which) problems you are trying to solve
> with microformats.

My take on this is that there is currently a significant amount of
explicit data published on the Web which is presented solely in a
human-readable form. Much of this data can additionally be made
machine-readable using the microformat techniques, gaining the
benefits of automation computers offer.

I don't certainly don't think microformats offer the best solution to
all data markup problems, just that there are a large number of
situations where they may be preferable to (say) a plain XML approach,
especially in the doc-oriented Web. In other cases XHTML may just
complicate matters. There is a danger of "when the only tool you have
is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". The assumption that all
developers will be more familiar with HTML than other forms of markup
is questionable. I also suspect that presenting microformats as a
one-size-fits-all alternative to XML is likely to be counterproductive
when it comes to adoption. But presented as a complementary
alternative to plain XML, they make sense.

What type of applications and/or services do you
> envision consuming these data structures?

Personally I'm looking at tools that resemble RSS aggregators, but
using the RDF model extend into domains beyond simple blog-like
content. I'd be interested in hearing what other people have in mind.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From joe.gregorio at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 06:44:48 2005
From: joe.gregorio at gmail.com (Joe Gregorio)
Date: Mon Oct  3 06:44:53 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
> I am looking for format definitions that are not tied to the
> presentation layer so that I can effectively reuse them in the other
> layers of my web application as well as within XML content
> repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc.

What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
within XML content
repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc."" ?

   -joe

--
Joe Gregorio        http://bitworking.org
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Mon Oct  3 08:34:10 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Mon Oct  3 08:34:22 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Education-ing Others
In-Reply-To: <3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <41519D7D-6427-4D22-9726-45771A002706@opendarwin.org>

Hi Joe & Scott,

For the record, this is *precisely* the sort of serious but civil  
discussion I was hoping to see on these lists.  I hope we can keep it  
that way. :-)

My perspective:

On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:44 AM, Joe Gregorio wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
>> I am looking for format definitions that are not tied to the
>> presentation layer so that I can effectively reuse them in the other
>> layers of my web application as well as within XML content
>> repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds,  
>> etc.
>
> What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
> can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
> within XML content repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP  
> messages, Atom feeds, etc."" ?

For data that is *never* intended for human consumption, and that is  
part of *private* communities with clearly-defined lines of  
authority, I think straight XML is actually a better solution.

However, I think Tantek was making his comments in the context of  
"The Web", as in the public, anarchic universe of human-readable  
documents.   For that world, I tend to agree with him: better to  
semantically annotate the existing content than duplicate everything  
in RDF or XML.  That seems the only solution that is likely to scale  
to non-experts, which I see as the critical success factor in *that*  
space.

-- Ernie P.

From drernie at opendarwin.org  Mon Oct  3 08:42:55 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Mon Oct  3 08:42:58 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] XOXT@Web2.0 Re: XHTML tables as CSV-like
	"records"?
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org>

Message-ID: 

Hi Ryan,

On Oct 2, 2005, at 10:45 PM, Ryan King wrote:
> Actually, it seems we need something like xoxo for tables:
>
> xoxo is to outlines as ? is to tables.

Precisely. Well put! The question is, does anyone else agree?

If XOXO = eXtensible Open XHTML Outlines, then are we looking for:

XOXT = eXtensible Open XHTML Tables (pronounced "zot" or "zoxed")?

Or perhaps XOXR ("zoccser", records)?

Would this contain anything other than  and its valid sub- 
elements?

> Your questions are good and well thought out. I hope my answers  
> have been helpful.

Yes, extremely so.   Thank you!

Perhaps we can discuss this at Web 2.0 this week.  I presume you'll  
be at Tantek's talk Wed AM?  Anyone else?

-- Ernie P.

From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 10:51:23 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 10:51:29 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 12:58 AM, Scott Anderson wrote:

> Tantek wrote:
>
>> There's basically a set of "XML zealots" that actively dislike
>> semantic (X)HTML, I'm not sure how else to put it.
>
> I might be one of those individuals that you are calling an XML
> zealot. I like the idea of semantic markup in XHTML but it is not
> clear to me as to what (or which) problems you are trying to solve
> with microformats.

Problems which involve the distributed publishing and consumption of  
information.

(purposely vague, we'll know the limits when we hit them)

> What type of applications and/or services do you
> envision consuming these data structures? XHTML is a presentation
> format so my inclination is to think that microformats will be
> relegated to the domain of JavaScript.

I beg to differ. XHTML is a structured document format. The fact that  
browsers have default renderings for it is a wonderrul convenience,  
but by no means necessary for the documents to be used.

> I am looking for format definitions that are not tied to the
> presentation layer

But XHTML doesn't have to be a presentation layer. You can just as  
easily view it as another model layer, (with CSS and Javascript being  
the presentation and control, respecitively).

> so that I can effectively reuse them in the other
> layers of my web application as well as within XML content
> repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc.
> My XHTML will not be hand generated. However, it will be generated by
> end users (designers and content providers) that know nothing of
> markup languages or semantics.
>
> I have not been able to determine if my requirements are outside the
> scope of what you are trying to accomplish. On the Wiki there is a
> "precise" definition of microformats that includes plain XML and Atom
> as containers so I was thinking that I am in the right place. However,
> your about page mentions that microformats are "highly correlated with
> semantic XHTML".

Right. Plain XML and Atom can carry XHTML as their payload.

> Then there is this recent statement...
>
>> Not everyone has figured out that "plain" XML has failed (with the
>> exceptions of RSS and XHTML) on the Web, and thus on its way down  
>> and out as
>> something that is seriously considered, expect to see more and more
>> desperate "last ditch" efforts to promote it like this article,  
>> and in fact,
>> there will always be a few individuals pushing it.
>
> This sort of arrogant ignorance is probably why us zealots have
> difficulty taking your vision seriously.

I wouldn't call Tantek ignorant. XML has largely failed *on the web.*

>> For these folks, I've learned that the only way to convince them  
>> is to go
>> off and succeed with real working examples, rather than to try to  
>> spend time
>> educating them.
>
> A specification of an example application or service will suffice for
> me. I can extrapolate the rest. All I see on the site and wiki is
> rhetoric and hyperbole. If microformats is limited to structured
> blogging then you have already lost me. In my opinion "Web
> microcontent publishing in general" is a pretty useless definition.

I can sketch out an application for you, if you like, but building  
applications has, so far, not been our focus around here. Mostly,  
though, microformats can be seen as a way to enhance current  
applications- this is esp. true, since we try to model the  
development of microformats around current behavior.

>> They don't *want* to be educated.  Heck, they don't think
>> they *need* to be educated, they think they are already experts on  
>> semantic
>> markup (never mind that typically none of their web pages are valid).
>
> I think it is more likely that you have failed in your attempts to
> educate others about what you are trying to achieve.

If you have questions about microformats, feel free to ask.

>> I've just decided that my own time is better spent making
>> microformats succeed rather than fighting/arguing/educating XML  
>> zealots.
>
> What is your criteria for determining when you have made  
> microformats a success?

When people adopt them (and it only takes them 45 mins to implement  
them across their entire site).

-ryan
From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 10:56:28 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 10:56:31 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] XOXT@Web2.0 Re: XHTML tables as CSV-like
	"records"?
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org>

Message-ID: <1E16B85C-D136-471F-B835-32668CF2D46E@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 8:42 AM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> Hi Ryan,
>
> On Oct 2, 2005, at 10:45 PM, Ryan King wrote:
>
>> Actually, it seems we need something like xoxo for tables:
>>
>> xoxo is to outlines as ? is to tables.
>
> Precisely. Well put! The question is, does anyone else agree?
>
> If XOXO = eXtensible Open XHTML Outlines, then are we looking for:
>
> XOXT = eXtensible Open XHTML Tables (pronounced "zot" or "zoxed")?
>
> Or perhaps XOXR ("zoccser", records)?

Sounds like a Motorolla phone.

> Would this contain anything other than  and its valid sub- 
> elements?

Well, here's the general idea:

I'd like to define a subset of  + children that can be  
unambiguously unserialzed to data structures in common programming  
languages.

We have similar stuff for XOXO that Kevin will hopefully soon be open  
sourcing, which converts xoxo to and from python and php.

Being able to convert between lists of lists or arrays of arrays to  
html tables (and back) would be a useful new microformat.

>> Your questions are good and well thought out. I hope my answers  
>> have been helpful.
>
> Yes, extremely so.   Thank you!
>
> Perhaps we can discuss this at Web 2.0 this week.  I presume you'll  
> be at Tantek's talk Wed AM?  Anyone else?

Planning on it.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From kmarks at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 11:13:02 2005
From: kmarks at technorati.com (Kevin Marks)
Date: Mon Oct  3 11:13:09 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] XOXT@Web2.0 Re: XHTML tables as CSV-like
	"records"?
In-Reply-To: <1E16B85C-D136-471F-B835-32668CF2D46E@technorati.com>
References: 
	<88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org>

	<1E16B85C-D136-471F-B835-32668CF2D46E@technorati.com>
Message-ID: <67fba3858b5dbe2e7f420b3301f3fb7a@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 10:56 AM, Ryan King wrote:
>
> We have similar stuff for XOXO that Kevin will hopefully soon be open 
> sourcing, which converts xoxo to and from python and php.

I already open sourced it, just waiting fro a repository to be set up 
to put it in properly.

>
> Being able to convert between lists of lists or arrays of arrays to 
> html tables (and back) would be a useful new microformat.

Definitely.

From drernie at opendarwin.org  Mon Oct  3 11:22:12 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Mon Oct  3 11:22:15 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] XOXT@Web2.0 Re: XHTML tables as CSV-like
	"records"?
In-Reply-To: <1E16B85C-D136-471F-B835-32668CF2D46E@technorati.com>
References: 
	<88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org>

	<1E16B85C-D136-471F-B835-32668CF2D46E@technorati.com>
Message-ID: 

Hi Ryan,

On Oct 3, 2005, at 10:56 AM, Ryan King wrote:

> I'd like to define a subset of  + children that can be  
> unambiguously unserialzed to data structures in common programming  
> languages.
>
> We have similar stuff for XOXO that Kevin will hopefully soon be  
> open sourcing, which converts xoxo to and from python and php.
>
> Being able to convert between lists of lists or arrays of arrays to  
> html tables (and back) would be a useful new microformat.

Ooh! Ooh!  Exactly!!

>> Perhaps we can discuss this at Web 2.0 this week.  I presume  
>> you'll be at Tantek's talk Wed AM?  Anyone else?
>
> Planning on it.

I would *love* to address the general topic of "Microformat  
Serialization" this week at Web 2.0.  In fact, I've rewritten my  
plist proposal in support of that:

https://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/xoxo-datatypes.html

As always, comments are welcome.

-- Ernie P.
From dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 11:29:35 2005
From: dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com (Dimitri Glazkov)
Date: Mon Oct  3 11:29:40 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] XOXT@Web2.0 Re: XHTML tables as CSV-like
	"records"?
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<88285D9E-DE7B-4041-AF78-8423B142F2B7@opendarwin.org>

	<1E16B85C-D136-471F-B835-32668CF2D46E@technorati.com>

Message-ID: 

I love where this discussion is going!

I tried (and failed miserably) to talk about "result sets" (Tantek
gets the credit for naming them correctly) earlier -- remember the
"controlled-collection" fiasco?

I think the direction that this discussion is progressing toward is
similar in spirit to my idea, although I was trying to address a
different need: coming up with a consistent way to describe how to
query and manage a result set.

:DG<
From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 13:23:13 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 13:23:17 2005
Subject: Fwd: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: 

[apoligies for any duplicate responses...orginally sent to list from
wrong email address]

On 10/3/05, Joe Gregorio  wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
> > I am looking for format definitions that are not tied to the
> > presentation layer so that I can effectively reuse them in the other
> > layers of my web application as well as within XML content
> > repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc.
>
> What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
> can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
> within XML content
> repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc."" ?

The key word was "effectively". By employing a namespace strategy I
have the freedom to mashup XML fragments as I see fit. You might be
writing clean XHTML documents with very little non-sematic baggage
associated with them. Myself, I am dynamically generating XHTML
content that is being personalized based on rules provided by the user
while also being tailored for the device being used to view the
content.

The XHTML documents that I generate are the result of compositing
various content-oriented and/or service-oriented document components
(portlets) together. Each portlet could have the functionality and
usability requirements of a google map. I have been seeing
microformats as a potential mechanism for these portlets to share
their data with each other via the DOM.

For my needs it makes no sense to persist these complex portal
documents in my content respository when only a small fraction of the
markup is viable and reusable. It makes much better sense to keep the
data content separate from the presentation content so I can
effectively present the same content in many different ways.

You may suggest that I use static persistable non-presentational XHTML
as a data source to my process of generating the dynamic
presention-oriented XHTML that I require. What would be the advantages
of doing this? If microformats are only useful in limited contexts
then their usefullness to me evaporates very quickly.
From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 13:24:05 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 13:24:09 2005
Subject: Fwd: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

Message-ID: 

[apoligies for any duplicate responses...orginally sent to list from
wrong email address]

On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2005, at 12:58 AM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> > I like the idea of semantic markup in XHTML but it is not
> > clear to me as to what (or which) problems you are trying to solve
> > with microformats.
>
> Problems which involve the distributed publishing and consumption of
> information.
>
> (purposely vague, we'll know the limits when we hit them)

Which problems relating to the publishing and consuming of content
would be better solved through the use of XHTML and microformats than
a solution based on the Atom syndication and publishing formats.

> > What type of applications and/or services do you
> > envision consuming these data structures? XHTML is a presentation
> > format so my inclination is to think that microformats will be
> > relegated to the domain of JavaScript.
>
> I beg to differ. XHTML is a structured document format. The fact that
> browsers have default renderings for it is a wonderrul convenience,
> but by no means necessary for the documents to be used.

In my opinion XHTML would need to be enhanced by much more than
microformats for it to become useful as a general XML document format.
I think trying to overload the format to handle different type of
applications will increase its complexity while decreasing its utility
for each application domain.

> >> Not everyone has figured out that "plain" XML has failed (with the
> >> exceptions of RSS and XHTML) on the Web, and thus on its way down
> >> and out as something that is seriously considered, expect to see more and more
> >> desperate "last ditch" efforts to promote it like this article,
> >> and in fact, there will always be a few individuals pushing it.
> >
> > This sort of arrogant ignorance is probably why us zealots have
> > difficulty taking your vision seriously.
>
> I wouldn't call Tantek ignorant. XML has largely failed *on the web.*

XHTML is XML
Atom is XML
SOAP is XML
XMPP is XML
WSRP is XML
WML is XML

What non-XML formats have succeeded?

> I can sketch out an application for you, if you like, but building
> applications has, so far, not been our focus around here. Mostly,
> though, microformats can be seen as a way to enhance current
> applications- this is esp. true, since we try to model the
> development of microformats around current behavior.

I think it would be very useful if you could sketch out an example of
how microformats could typically be used to enhance current
applications.
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 14:00:10 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:00:13 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

Message-ID: <14be96d30510031400t3faeec4cg93e69d01a94d73ee@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
> What non-XML formats have succeeded?

You mean other than HTML?

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From joe.gregorio at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 14:01:55 2005
From: joe.gregorio at gmail.com (Joe Gregorio)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:01:59 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>

Scott,

I asked:

> > What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
> > can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
> > within XML content
> > repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc."" ?

You answered:

> For my needs it makes no sense to persist these complex portal
> documents in my content respository when only a small fraction of the
> markup is viable and reusable. It makes much better sense to keep the
> data content separate from the presentation content so I can
> effectively present the same content in many different ways.

You don't seem to be looking for answers but appear to be
trying to stake out a position.

  -joe

--
Joe Gregorio        http://bitworking.org
From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 14:08:27 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:08:29 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510031400t3faeec4cg93e69d01a94d73ee@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<14be96d30510031400t3faeec4cg93e69d01a94d73ee@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
> > What non-XML formats have succeeded?
>
> You mean other than HTML?
>
I was thinking that XHTML would succeed HTML.
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 14:20:16 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:20:19 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<14be96d30510031400t3faeec4cg93e69d01a94d73ee@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <14be96d30510031420p75dc07c3g361cb16198a12f01@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
> I was thinking that XHTML would succeed HTML.

/me backs away slowly...

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 14:23:37 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:23:41 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

Message-ID: <20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 1:09 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 12:58 AM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>>
>>> I like the idea of semantic markup in XHTML but it is not
>>> clear to me as to what (or which) problems you are trying to solve
>>> with microformats.
>>
>> Problems which involve the distributed publishing and consumption of
>> information.
>>
>> (purposely vague, we'll know the limits when we hit them)
>
> Which problems relating to the publishing and consuming of content
> would be better solved through the use of XHTML and microformats than
> a solution based on the Atom syndication and publishing formats.

Assuming this is a question sans question mark....

As someone (Danny or Ernie, I think) in this thread has already  
pointed out... there are many cases where data is *already being  
published in (x)html* - microformats are a way of making that data  
explicit and, therefore, consumable without introducing a second  
public representation of the data.

>>> What type of applications and/or services do you
>>> envision consuming these data structures? XHTML is a presentation
>>> format so my inclination is to think that microformats will be
>>> relegated to the domain of JavaScript.
>>
>> I beg to differ. XHTML is a structured document format. The fact that
>> browsers have default renderings for it is a wonderrul convenience,
>> but by no means necessary for the documents to be used.
>
> In my opinion XHTML would need to be enhanced by much more than
> microformats for it to become useful as a general XML document format.

Who said "general xml document format"? Not I.

> I think trying to overload the format to handle different type of
> applications will increase its complexity while decreasing its utility
> for each application domain.

Of course, though, each extension can be independent of others.

>>>> Not everyone has figured out that "plain" XML has failed (with the
>>>> exceptions of RSS and XHTML) on the Web, and thus on its way down
>>>> and out as something that is seriously considered, expect to see  
>>>> more and more
>>>> desperate "last ditch" efforts to promote it like this article,
>>>> and in fact, there will always be a few individuals pushing it.
>>>
>>> This sort of arrogant ignorance is probably why us zealots have
>>> difficulty taking your vision seriously.
>>
>> I wouldn't call Tantek ignorant. XML has largely failed *on the web.*
>>
>
> XHTML is XML
> Atom is XML
> SOAP is XML
> XMPP is XML
> WSRP is XML
> WML is XML
>
> What non-XML formats have succeeded?

Plain text. HTML. CSS. Windows Media (ewww!), Quicktime. JPG. GIF. PNG?

>> I can sketch out an application for you, if you like, but building
>> applications has, so far, not been our focus around here. Mostly,
>> though, microformats can be seen as a way to enhance current
>> applications- this is esp. true, since we try to model the
>> development of microformats around current behavior.
>
> I think it would be very useful if you could sketch out an example of
> how microformats could typically be used to enhance current
> applications.

A quick example of something that's already happened:

upcoming.org implemented hcalendar and hcard in about 45 minutes. Now  
you can use X2V (http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/) to extract all that  
information in iCal and vCard.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Mon Oct  3 14:29:42 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:29:46 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <4341A2C6.7090601@blogmatrix.com>

Scott Anderson wrote:
> Tantek wrote:
>>There's basically a set of "XML zealots" that actively dislike
>>semantic (X)HTML, I'm not sure how else to put it.
> 
> I might be one of those individuals that you are calling an XML
> zealot. I like the idea of semantic markup in XHTML but it is not
> clear to me as to what (or which) problems you are trying to solve
> with microformats. What type of applications and/or services do you
> envision consuming these data structures? XHTML is a presentation
> format so my inclination is to think that microformats will be
> relegated to the domain of JavaScript.

Answering the question "what problem is trying to be solved by 
microformats?" requires taking a step and asking "what are 
microfomats?". The website [1] provides a number of answers to this 
question, but I prefer to answer: *microformats provide a consistent 
vocabulary for expressing semantic information commonly found in HTML 
documents; they are discovered as much as they are created*.

There is no "change the world" philosophy behind microformats; they are 
layered into existing structures and behaviors of content creators. The 
gap between HTML for presentation and HTML+microformats for semantics is 
very very small; the narrowness of this gap is what will drive 
microformat adoption. We've seen this sort of thing before: it wasn't 
large leap from "CMS generates HTML" to "CMS also generates RSS"; and 
suddenly the web is connected and bound in way that was hardly imagined 
5 years ago.

The question of what type of application and/or service will use 
microformats isn't that important [IMHO, as is everything else I write]. 
Why? Because if the microformat approach to the web is as powerful as 
many of us think it is, the applications that will be using it in two, 
five or ten years time will surprise or even amaze us, just like TCP/IP, 
RFC822, HTTP+HTML and RSS did over time. Hopefully like these standards, 
there is something _elemental_ about microformats

Of course, it may not be and we'll all look back on this in a couple of 
years and grimace or laugh. But I doubt it.

> What is your criteria for determining when you have made microformats a success?

Success.

Regards, etc...
David Janes
http://www.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://www.microformats.org/about/
From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 14:29:46 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:29:52 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: 

On Oct 3, 2005, at 1:23 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:

> [apoligies for any duplicate responses...orginally sent to list from
> wrong email address]
>
> On 10/3/05, Joe Gregorio  wrote:
>
>> On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
>>
>>> I am looking for format definitions that are not tied to the
>>> presentation layer so that I can effectively reuse them in the other
>>> layers of my web application as well as within XML content
>>> repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds,  
>>> etc.
>>
>> What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
>> can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
>> within XML content
>> repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds,  
>> etc."" ?
>
> The key word was "effectively". By employing a namespace strategy I
> have the freedom to mashup XML fragments as I see fit. You might be
> writing clean XHTML documents with very little non-sematic baggage
> associated with them. Myself, I am dynamically generating XHTML
> content that is being personalized based on rules provided by the user
> while also being tailored for the device being used to view the
> content.
>
> The XHTML documents that I generate are the result of compositing
> various content-oriented and/or service-oriented document components
> (portlets) together.

Same here.

> Each portlet could have the functionality and
> usability requirements of a google map. I have been seeing
> microformats as a potential mechanism for these portlets to share
> their data with each other via the DOM.

Certainly.

> For my needs it makes no sense to persist these complex portal
> documents in my content respository when only a small fraction of the
> markup is viable and reusable. It makes much better sense to keep the
> data content separate from the presentation content so I can
> effectively present the same content in many different ways.

Not sure what you're getting at here. Perhaps you could explain more?

> You may suggest that I use static persistable non-presentational XHTML
> as a data source to my process of generating the dynamic
> presention-oriented XHTML that I require.

Um, no. You can store your data however you want. I don't care. I'm  
just saying that he xhtml you produce can be viewed as data source.

> What would be the advantages
> of doing this? If microformats are only useful in limited contexts
> then their usefullness to me evaporates very quickly.

Ah, so you prefer things that are useful everywhere? Like..?

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 14:30:31 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:30:34 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510031420p75dc07c3g361cb16198a12f01@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<14be96d30510031400t3faeec4cg93e69d01a94d73ee@mail.gmail.com>

	<14be96d30510031420p75dc07c3g361cb16198a12f01@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <82CAC065-840E-47F2-81D9-0AAB560A6CC3@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 2:20 PM, Mark Pilgrim wrote:

> On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
>
>> I was thinking that XHTML would succeed HTML.
>
> /me backs away slowly...

Shall I call the bomb squad? HazMat maybe?

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From kevin at lawver.net  Mon Oct  3 14:14:03 2005
From: kevin at lawver.net (Kevin Lawver)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:32:17 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>	
	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>

I think the original question is a good one, and one that maybe is 
lacking in examples on the wiki: Are there "successful" examples of 
machines parsing, and getting something meaningful, out of the existing 
microformats?

I know that rubhub has parsed XFN, but it's the simplest of the 
microformats, and probably won't convince a whole lot of people that 
it's sustainable or performant.  Are there others that we can point to 
as success stories?

In a quick search around the wiki, I found something about parsing 
hCard, but no code examples or links to sites doing it 
(http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing).

Kevin
http://lawver.net

Joe Gregorio wrote:
> Scott,
> 
> I asked:
> 
> 
>>>What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
>>>can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
>>>within XML content
>>>repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc."" ?
> 
> 
> You answered:
> 
> 
>>For my needs it makes no sense to persist these complex portal
>>documents in my content respository when only a small fraction of the
>>markup is viable and reusable. It makes much better sense to keep the
>>data content separate from the presentation content so I can
>>effectively present the same content in many different ways.
> 
> 
> You don't seem to be looking for answers but appear to be
> trying to stake out a position.
> 
>   -joe
> 
> --
> Joe Gregorio        http://bitworking.org
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
> 

From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 14:43:17 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 14:43:20 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
References: 	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>	
	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
Message-ID: <3DA27CAC-6AB1-46AA-98E5-0634451FA202@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 2:14 PM, Kevin Lawver wrote:

> I think the original question is a good one, and one that maybe is  
> lacking in examples on the wiki: Are there "successful" examples of  
> machines parsing, and getting something meaningful, out of the  
> existing microformats?
>
> I know that rubhub has parsed XFN, but it's the simplest of the  
> microformats, and probably won't convince a whole lot of people  
> that it's sustainable or performant.  Are there others that we can  
> point to as success stories?
>
> In a quick search around the wiki, I found something about parsing  
> hCard, but no code examples or links to sites doing it (http:// 
> microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing).

http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/ for hcard and hCalendar

And I know that there's others working on indexing these formats, but  
I'll let them speak for themselves.

-ryan
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 15:00:05 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Mon Oct  3 15:00:08 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/3/05, Kevin Lawver  wrote:
> I think the original question is a good one, and one that maybe is
> lacking in examples on the wiki: Are there "successful" examples of
> machines parsing, and getting something meaningful, out of the existing
> microformats?

I'm writing Greasemonkey scripts to parse all the known microformats. 
I have two done already:

http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/hcard/
http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/rellicense/

hCalendar is next.  I've already done XFN parsing too, which is part
of Magic Line:

http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/magicline.user.js

Eventually all of these will come together in a super-script that
parses all available data in every page you ever browse, and publishes
it to your own private Atom Store via the Atom API.  (This part is
already written as well, though unreleased.)

Imagine having your own private database of every person you've ever
stumbled across online, and being able to download their vCards into
your address book.  And every event, which you can download into
iCal/Sunbird/Outlook.  Plus a list of all the Creative
Commons-licensed content you've ever read, which you can repurpose --
legally, according to the terms of the license.

Now imagine searching such a database.  And subscribing to your search
results as a syndicated feed.

It's coming.  Within weeks, not years.  All the data is out there;
people are publishing this stuff anyway.  If they publish it just 1%
better (with appropriate microformatting), I can get 1000% more out of
it.

Or do you just use your browser to browse?  That's so 20th century.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Mon Oct  3 15:02:20 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Mon Oct  3 15:02:24 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] XML -- what is it good for [was: Educationg
	Others]
In-Reply-To: 
References: 	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>	

Message-ID: <4341AA6C.5060308@blogmatrix.com>

 >>>> [Tantek]
>>>>Not everyone has figured out that "plain" XML has failed (with the
>>>>exceptions of RSS and XHTML) on the Web, and thus on its way down
>>>>and out as something that is seriously considered, expect to see more and more
>>>>desperate "last ditch" efforts to promote it like this article,
>>>>and in fact, there will always be a few individuals pushing it.
>>>
 >>>[Scott Anderson]
>>>This sort of arrogant ignorance is probably why us zealots have
>>>difficulty taking your vision seriously.
>>
 >>[Ryan King]
>>I wouldn't call Tantek ignorant. XML has largely failed *on the web.*
> 
> [Scott Anderson]
> XHTML is XML
> Atom is XML
> SOAP is XML
> XMPP is XML
> WSRP is XML
> WML is XML
> 

I was going to avoid this one, because it smells of religion. However...

I have one XML book at home: "The XML Companion" by Neil Bradley 
published in 1998 -- not that long ago. Here's a few choice paragraphs

| XML is an ideal data format for storing structured and semi-structured
| text intended for dissemenation and ultimate publication, perhaps on a
| variety of media.

Fair enough. What's going to happen to HTML then from the perspective of 
a 1998 XML-fan?

| HTML has some unique features that XML does not aim to replicate. It
| is particularly suited to form based interactions. In addition, the
| built-in HTML rendering capability of popular browsers is greater than
| that of the most popular style sheet mechanism (CSS). But when
| powerful stylesheet mechanisms are more widely available, there will
| be nothing to prevent a future version of HTML from becoming an
| application of XML...

That is HTML was going to become a niche application of XML but XML is 
where the action was going to be -- XML + stylesheets = the new web. The 
rest of the book continues with this type of ... stuff

| 
| An example of an XML fragment
| 
| bla bla bla
| The second paragraph
| 
| 

The web is going to be arbitrary formatted XML documents, supposedly 
chock full of semantic goodness [because computers know what  is, 
as opposed to ? -- dpj] and whipped into presentation format by 
stylesheets.

This was the future of the web in 1998; find almost any other XML-phile 
from the same period and you'll find more of the same. Where did we end 
up? HTML has been restated as an XML application -- by the W3C, but not 
because stylesheets made this possible. There's a couple of high profile 
well-defined (or "well-defined") XML applications out there, RSS being 
the most notable. There's a bunch of niche XML applications that you 
never see, written one-off for particular applications that want to 
enjoy a text based file format.

But a web full of XML documents of arbitrary application; "plain XML"? 
That future never happened.

Regards, etc...
David Janes
http://www.blogmatrix.com
From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 15:15:57 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 15:16:00 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Joe Gregorio  wrote:
> Scott,
>
> I asked:
>
> > > What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
> > > can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
> > > within XML content
> > > repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom feeds, etc."" ?
>
> You answered:
>
> > For my needs it makes no sense to persist these complex portal
> > documents in my content respository when only a small fraction of the
> > markup is viable and reusable. It makes much better sense to keep the
> > data content separate from the presentation content so I can
> > effectively present the same content in many different ways.
>
> You don't seem to be looking for answers but appear to be
> trying to stake out a position.

I am looking for answers on what standardized content formats to use
in my software and how best to make use of them for my particular
requirements. I am not advocating that anyone do what I am doing or
that what anyone else is doing is wrong. The only position I am taking
is that a technology or format is bound to become increasingly complex
and less usable the more you attempt to reuse it to solve disparate
problems.

I see microformats usefulness being constrained by portability issues
relating to it being tied so closely to XHTML syntax and context. I
also believe that a lack of common design patterns within microformats
will make it harder for developers to adopt and support it. If
microformats are successful I will support them. As it is, I need to
be convinced that there is a potential tipping point on the horizon
before I make an investment. I don't see it yet.

I realize that most people on this list are not facing the
requirements that I am and are not interested in providing the type of
solutions that I am interested in developing. I can also understand
that my criticisms may not be relevant to what others are doing.
Basically, I don't want to have to support two different XML formats
that describe the same data. I am being told that the XHTML used in
microformats is indeed portable. Has this been demonstrated to be
true? I have a lot of doubts that the context is portable or the
support requirements are trivial.

If I do need to support a secondary format that gets used to generate
microformats in my XHTML does anyone know of a good candidate for this
besides RDF?

Note to Danny: I will be looking into how to map RDF to my JSR 170
content repository. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how
best to approach this task. I would need to define some custom node
types. (http://www.jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr170/)
From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 15:20:52 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 15:20:58 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
	<14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On Oct 3, 2005, at 3:00 PM, Mark Pilgrim wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Kevin Lawver  wrote:
>
>> I think the original question is a good one, and one that maybe is
>> lacking in examples on the wiki: Are there "successful" examples of
>> machines parsing, and getting something meaningful, out of the  
>> existing
>> microformats?
>
> I'm writing Greasemonkey scripts to parse all the known microformats.
> I have two done already:
>
> http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/hcard/
> http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/rellicense/
>
> hCalendar is next.  I've already done XFN parsing too, which is part
> of Magic Line:
>
> http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/magicline.user.js
>
> Eventually all of these will come together in a super-script that
> parses all available data in every page you ever browse, and publishes
> it to your own private Atom Store via the Atom API.  (This part is
> already written as well, though unreleased.)
>
> Imagine having your own private database of every person you've ever
> stumbled across online, and being able to download their vCards into
> your address book.  And every event, which you can download into
> iCal/Sunbird/Outlook.  Plus a list of all the Creative
> Commons-licensed content you've ever read, which you can repurpose --
> legally, according to the terms of the license.
>
> Now imagine searching such a database.  And subscribing to your search
> results as a syndicated feed.
>
> It's coming.  Within weeks, not years.  All the data is out there;
> people are publishing this stuff anyway.  If they publish it just 1%
> better (with appropriate microformatting), I can get 1000% more out of
> it.
>
> Or do you just use your browser to browse?  That's so 20th century.

Mark Pilgrim is my hero.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From drernie at opendarwin.org  Mon Oct  3 15:44:33 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Mon Oct  3 15:44:38 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <66D46E07-31E4-4691-B3E1-57173CD94D36@opendarwin.org>

Hi Scott,

On Oct 3, 2005, at 3:15 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> Basically, I don't want to have to support two different XML formats
> that describe the same data. I am being told that the XHTML used in
> microformats is indeed portable. Has this been demonstrated to be
> true? I have a lot of doubts that the context is portable or the
> support requirements are trivial.
>
> If I do need to support a secondary format that gets used to generate
> microformats in my XHTML does anyone know of a good candidate for this
> besides RDF?

I'm not sure we're even talking about the same problem.  By "on the  
web" we here (I think) all mean 'the human-readable web'.  If your  
web is the "semi-private, machine-only web of automated web  
services", then we're pretty much living in different universes.

For example, If you are looking at XML as a way to, say:
	- replace your existing SQL database as an internal datastore; or
	- define a controlled vocabulary for machine-readable apps in a  
vertical industry with good governance
then by all means, use a custom XML schema. That's not the problem  
we're trying to solve here.  We don't want a zillion microformats,  
one for every vertical industry imaginable.

However, if you are planning to do anything involving the *mass  
market* web, where HTML is *already* part of your workflow, then I  
would encourage you to look at "piggybacking" microformat semantics  
on top of XHTML rather than publishing a *second*, distinct, XML  
output. That way, it allows anonymous consumers the chance to extract  
semantic data directly from your existing web pages, rather than  
having to negotiate a specific XML format.

That's all we're saying. I think. XHTML is a good format for:
	a) externally-publishing data you (also) want humans to read
	b) storing data that is primarily document-centric and thus maps  
nicely onto HTML's native semantics

You'd be surprised how many people try to use XML for *that*, which I  
suspect  why Tantek and others react so strongly to what they call  
"XML zealots."  But, IMHO, if you are truly doing something for which  
XHTML itself has zero value -- and a custom XML solves both your  
technical and social problems -- then please, go for it!

Best,
-- Ernie P.
From kmarks at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 16:39:20 2005
From: kmarks at technorati.com (Kevin Marks)
Date: Mon Oct  3 16:39:34 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Resilient File Formats
Message-ID: <3dc80f9ede93e040a371c5122d100956@technorati.com>

On the question of which file formats succeed, the answer is those that  
are resilient. The ones that provide a method for expansion, and a way  
for multiple versions to coexist safely.
Backwards compatibility is a necessary part of this, but it is not  
sufficient - forwards compatibility is what wins out

I see 3 big generations of file format here:

RFC 822 style (ascii key:value, as in Mail headers and HTTP headers)
IFF style (keyed binary blobs with length offsets) (IFF, AIFF, TIFF,  
QuickTime, WAV, AVI, MPEG4)
SGML style (ascii    model) (SGML, HTML, XML, XHTML)

In each case, these define a way for different generations of the same  
format to coexist by defining that it is OK to discard elements you  
don't understand.

This provides baseline compatibility (old parsers generally don't crash  
on new data, unlike more naive formats), but still requires work to  
define the sub elements of the format to interoperate.

It provides for graceful degradation, with older or less-featured  
clients able to display the subset they understand, rather than balking  
completely.

If you replace an element with a more general one, you may need to  
continue to include the old version for the previous generation of  
parsers.

Having worked at Apple on QuickTime for 5 years, and spent 10 years  
before that tracking it, I've seen that it does take some care to adapt  
and update in a way that will not break old clients, but the benefits  
for users of your format are immense (the unofficial motto there was  
'no movie left behind'). Of course, if your users are happy, this helps  
your adoption.

HTML took this from SGML, and in many ways expanded it further due to  
the toleration of sloppy markup from user-agents, to the point where  
people writing parsers had a bit of tough time of it.

XML was an over-reaction to this - it instituted draconian parsing by  
design, and effectively gave the green light for everyone to make up  
their own format without consideration for others at all (with  
namespaces as a figleaf to cover this, and coerce coexistence post  
hoc).

Microformats build on the older model of backward compatibility through  
selective enhancement. This is a bit more work for the parser and  
format designer, but much less for those creating data using the  
format, who can readily pick up the latest version to enhance their  
existing HTML without harming their other uses.

Working within XHTML does impose constraints on how you can express  
things, but as Cory Doctorow put it last week:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/09/26/themepunks_3/print.html
> "It's like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of  
> foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that  
> doesn't go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit  
> console that'll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one  
> with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there's not much  
> traditional constraint. I've got the engineer's most dangerous luxury:  
> plenty. All the computational cycles I'll ever need. Easy and rapid  
> prototyping. Precision tools.

Working with constraints is what makes for good Art, and good  
Engineering, whether the constraints are cultural or structural.

Without shared meaning there can be no communication. Microformats work  
to converge shared meaning without disrupting other uses, and to  
enhance rather than replace what you are doing already.

This started as a mail reply, but it became a blog posts somewhere  
along the way:
http://epeus.blogspot.com/ 
2005_10_01_epeus_archive.html#112838262830478654

From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 15:27:57 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 17:14:37 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: 

On Oct 3, 2005, at 3:15 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Joe Gregorio  wrote:
>> Scott,
>>
>> I asked:
>>
>>>> What do you see in XHTML that makes you think that you
>>>> can't reuse it in ""other layers of my web application as well as
>>>> within XML content
>>>> repositories, various XML descriptors, SOAP messages, Atom  
>>>> feeds, etc."" ?
>>
>> You answered:
>>
>>> For my needs it makes no sense to persist these complex portal
>>> documents in my content respository when only a small fraction of  
>>> the
>>> markup is viable and reusable. It makes much better sense to keep  
>>> the
>>> data content separate from the presentation content so I can
>>> effectively present the same content in many different ways.
>>
>> You don't seem to be looking for answers but appear to be
>> trying to stake out a position.
>
> I am looking for answers on what standardized content formats to use
> in my software and how best to make use of them for my particular
> requirements. I am not advocating that anyone do what I am doing or
> that what anyone else is doing is wrong. The only position I am taking
> is that a technology or format is bound to become increasingly complex
> and less usable the more you attempt to reuse it to solve disparate
> problems.

If you're saying: "Don't use that, because if you keep using if for  
different stuff, it'll get complex."

Then I think that statement can apply to any technology.

> I see microformats usefulness being constrained by portability issues
> relating to it being tied so closely to XHTML syntax and context.

And which issues would those be?

> I
> also believe that a lack of common design patterns within microformats
> will make it harder for developers to adopt and support it.

We don't have common design patterns?

> If
> microformats are successful I will support them. As it is, I need to
> be convinced that there is a potential tipping point on the horizon
> before I make an investment. I don't see it yet.

I'll speed up the time machine, then.

> I realize that most people on this list are not facing the
> requirements that I am and are not interested in providing the type of
> solutions that I am interested in developing.

Of course, we have *no idea* what "solutions" you're providing. Nor  
you, us.

> I can also understand
> that my criticisms may not be relevant to what others are doing.
> Basically, I don't want to have to support two different XML formats
> that describe the same data.

I don't think anyone *wants* to do that.

> I am being told that the XHTML used in
> microformats is indeed portable. Has this been demonstrated to be
> true? I have a lot of doubts that the context is portable or the
> support requirements are trivial.

Portable? No idea what you mean here.

AFAIK, microformats can *go* anywhere xhtml can.

> If I do need to support a secondary format that gets used to generate
> microformats in my XHTML does anyone know of a good candidate for this
> besides RDF?

Wha?

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From pilgrim at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 17:28:38 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Mon Oct  3 17:28:42 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Resilient File Formats
In-Reply-To: <3dc80f9ede93e040a371c5122d100956@technorati.com>
References: <3dc80f9ede93e040a371c5122d100956@technorati.com>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510031728r31dde6e5y3604226e1daa7e29@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/3/05, Kevin Marks  wrote:
> HTML took this from SGML, and in many ways expanded it further due to
> the toleration of sloppy markup from user-agents, to the point where
> people writing parsers had a bit of tough time of it.
>
> XML was an over-reaction to this - it instituted draconian parsing by
> design, and effectively gave the green light for everyone to make up
> their own format without consideration for others at all (with
> namespaces as a figleaf to cover this, and coerce coexistence post
> hoc).

Everything Kevin said... especially the point about how draconian
error handling came to be.  See also
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/16/draconianism .  If you
poke around those original mailing list archives from 1997, you'll see
that XML was designed *precisely* to avoid "another HTML" (with
ultraliberal parsing and the nightmares contained therein).  The
decision was as controversial then as it is now; all we have to add to
the discussion now is eight years of hindsight.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 17:55:06 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 17:55:08 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2005, at 1:09 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> > In my opinion XHTML would need to be enhanced by much more than
> > microformats for it to become useful as a general XML document format.
>
> Who said "general xml document format"? Not I.
>

Do you see XHTML documents enhanced with microformats serving as a
general purpose xml content / data interchange format? Or is the
format intended to be primarily used in the context of a presenting
content to a human consumer along with sematic annotations?

> > I think trying to overload the format to handle different type of
> > applications will increase its complexity while decreasing its utility
> > for each application domain.
>
> Of course, though, each extension can be independent of others.

I was referring to XHTML application domains as either a general
purpose content container or as a presentation format. It seems to me
that these two functional requirements are in conflict with each
other.
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Mon Oct  3 18:42:16 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Mon Oct  3 18:42:24 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

Message-ID: <999DABAF-5E01-4013-A8DF-106FB399EC44@opendarwin.org>

Hi Scott,

> Do you see XHTML documents enhanced with microformats serving as a
> general purpose xml content / data interchange format? Or is the
> format intended to be primarily used in the context of a presenting
> content to a human consumer along with sematic annotations?

I think your specific "general purpose" may be quite different than  
our specific "general purpose". :-)

Pretty much everything I do -- including applications I write or  
worry about -- are intended for use by consumers I do not have a  
direct trust relationship with -- and for whom human-readability is  
always a *useful* aspect (even if not vital).  They prefer to be able  
to reuse their existing tools to consume that data without knowing  
the schema in advance, even if that implies some loss of rigor.

For that reason, I see XHTML+microformats as 'generally useful',  
including for applications that others where others might be tempted  
to use XML.

> I was referring to XHTML application domains as either a general
> purpose content container or as a presentation format. It seems to me
> that these two functional requirements are in conflict with each
> other.

If I'm going to publish  in that format anyway, I might as well use  
that as my data storage medium, since it is essentially self- 
documenting data where *I* can extract the useful content *I* need.   
It works for me.  But my world may be different than yours.

As Tantek quoted Rohit as saying, we know microformats work for us in  
practice; we do NOT know if they work in theory. Which is another way  
of saying we can't give you a robust theoretical justification for  
why _you_ should use microfomats even if you don't want to.  At this  
stage, it's more like "you either get them or you don't."

Which is okay.  If they don't make sense to you now, why not wait a  
few months and check back then? We may have more answers.  Or at  
least have learned better how to express them.

-- Ernie P.

On Oct 3, 2005, at 5:55 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:

> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 1:09 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>>> In my opinion XHTML would need to be enhanced by much more than
>>> microformats for it to become useful as a general XML document  
>>> format.
>>
>> Who said "general xml document format"? Not I.
>>
>
> Do you see XHTML documents enhanced with microformats serving as a
> general purpose xml content / data interchange format? Or is the
> format intended to be primarily used in the context of a presenting
> content to a human consumer along with sematic annotations?
>
>>> I think trying to overload the format to handle different type of
>>> applications will increase its complexity while decreasing its  
>>> utility
>>> for each application domain.
>>
>> Of course, though, each extension can be independent of others.
>
> I was referring to XHTML application domains as either a general
> purpose content container or as a presentation format. It seems to me
> that these two functional requirements are in conflict with each
> other.
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss

From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 18:47:31 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 18:47:34 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2005, at 1:23 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> > For my needs it makes no sense to persist these complex portal
> > documents in my content respository when only a small fraction of the
> > markup is viable and reusable. It makes much better sense to keep the
> > data content separate from the presentation content so I can
> > effectively present the same content in many different ways.
>
> Not sure what you're getting at here. Perhaps you could explain more?

I dynamically build my XHTML documents from a mixture of content data
and presentation data. The content markup typically gets wrapped by
layers of presentation markup. It could be that the only data I want
to publish as a microformat is the author of a single deeply embedded
component. How do I persist the context of the microformat instance
that includes the author's name when the  presentation is now part of
the context of that component? It is also typically the case that the
presentation markup outweighs the sematic content market by 100 to 1.
And the presentation is simply a snapshot that could change for
whatever reason invalidating the persisted context that was presented
to the user.

> > What would be the advantages
> > of doing this? If microformats are only useful in limited contexts
> > then their usefullness to me evaporates very quickly.
>
> Ah, so you prefer things that are useful everywhere? Like..?

Microformats would be more useful to me if they each had a standard
xml schema, if microformat instances required a unique id in the
context of its document, if the microformat markup did not include
presentation information, and finally if the microformat markup was
integrated as an annotation (hidden div?) to an XHTML element instead
of serving double duty as XHTML presentation elements. This would let
me cleanly repurpose and route microformats around my system without
having to go to the trouble of teaching the system to understand what
they are.
From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 19:09:15 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 19:09:18 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2005, at 3:15 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> If you're saying: "Don't use that, because if you keep using if for
> different stuff, it'll get complex."
>
> Then I think that statement can apply to any technology.

Agreed.

> > I see microformats usefulness being constrained by portability issues
> > relating to it being tied so closely to XHTML syntax and context.
>
> And which issues would those be?

It seems to me that preserving the context of a microformat instance
is tied to and requires an understanding of XHTML functionality,
vendor inconsistancies, new and deprecated features, etc.

> > I also believe that a lack of common design patterns within microformats
> > will make it harder for developers to adopt and support it.
>
> We don't have common design patterns?

I see a few here and there. Is there even one commonality between all
the formats besides being their being XML?
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 19:19:47 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Mon Oct  3 19:19:50 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <14be96d30510031919k239202f7me5fe2b95e8dba2fd@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
> > We don't have common design patterns?
>
> I see a few here and there. Is there even one commonality between all
> the formats besides being their being XML?

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard#Semantic_XHTML_Design_Principles

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 20:12:18 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 20:12:26 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <999DABAF-5E01-4013-A8DF-106FB399EC44@opendarwin.org>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<999DABAF-5E01-4013-A8DF-106FB399EC44@opendarwin.org>
Message-ID: <1BE037BA-932D-4FD7-800E-9AFEE6F5F7B6@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:42 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> Hi Scott,
>
>
>> Do you see XHTML documents enhanced with microformats serving as a
>> general purpose xml content / data interchange format? Or is the
>> format intended to be primarily used in the context of a presenting
>> content to a human consumer along with sematic annotations?
>
> I think your specific "general purpose" may be quite different than  
> our specific "general purpose". :-)

Exactly. Microformats are developed for specific purpose*s*, not  
usually for a *general purpose.* This is to avoid the "boiling the  
ocean" problem.

They, along with every other format should be evaluated on a case-by- 
case basis.

> Pretty much everything I do -- including applications I write or  
> worry about -- are intended for use by consumers I do not have a  
> direct trust relationship with -- and for whom human-readability is  
> always a *useful* aspect (even if not vital).  They prefer to be  
> able to reuse their existing tools to consume that data without  
> knowing the schema in advance, even if that implies some loss of  
> rigor.
>
> For that reason, I see XHTML+microformats as 'generally useful',  
> including for applications that others where others might be  
> tempted to use XML.
>
>
>> I was referring to XHTML application domains as either a general
>> purpose content container or as a presentation format. It seems to me
>> that these two functional requirements are in conflict with each
>> other.
>
> If I'm going to publish  in that format anyway, I might as well use  
> that as my data storage medium, since it is essentially self- 
> documenting data where *I* can extract the useful content *I*  
> need.  It works for me.  But my world may be different than yours.
>
> As Tantek quoted Rohit as saying, we know microformats work for us  
> in practice; we do NOT know if they work in theory. Which is  
> another way of saying we can't give you a robust theoretical  
> justification for why _you_ should use microfomats even if you  
> don't want to.  At this stage, it's more like "you either get them  
> or you don't."
>
> Which is okay.  If they don't make sense to you now, why not wait a  
> few months and check back then? We may have more answers.  Or at  
> least have learned better how to express them.

Well said, Ernie.

-ryan
From portletdev at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 20:42:49 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Mon Oct  3 20:42:52 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> A quick example of something that's already happened:
>
> upcoming.org implemented hcalendar and hcard in about 45 minutes. Now
> you can use X2V (http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/) to extract all that
> information in iCal and vCard.

How long did it take Brian to write, test, and debug the XSL that
reads the format?

http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/xhtml2vcal.xsl
From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 20:28:56 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 21:07:41 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] [Microformats-announce] talk at OSAF tomorrow
Message-ID: <898FEC85-2A25-487F-AF15-A011252C4955@technorati.com>

Sorry for the short notice, but I just wanted to point out that  
Tantek is giving a talk on microformats tomorrow, Tuesday at OSAF  
[http://www.osafoundation.org/].

Details: http://tantek.com/log/2005/10.html#d02t1850

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

_______________________________________________
Microformats-announce mailing list
Microformats-announce@microformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-announce
From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 21:15:17 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 21:15:21 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 1:23 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>>
>>> For my needs it makes no sense to persist these complex portal
>>> documents in my content respository when only a small fraction of  
>>> the
>>> markup is viable and reusable. It makes much better sense to keep  
>>> the
>>> data content separate from the presentation content so I can
>>> effectively present the same content in many different ways.
>>
>> Not sure what you're getting at here. Perhaps you could explain more?
>
> I dynamically build my XHTML documents from a mixture of content data
> and presentation data. The content markup typically gets wrapped by
> layers of presentation markup. It could be that the only data I want
> to publish as a microformat is the author of a single deeply embedded
> component. How do I persist the context of the microformat instance
> that includes the author's name when the  presentation is now part of
> the context of that component? It is also typically the case that the
> presentation markup outweighs the sematic content market by 100 to 1.
> And the presentation is simply a snapshot that could change for
> whatever reason invalidating the persisted context that was presented
> to the user.

I don't follow you here. A concrete example would be more useful.

>>> What would be the advantages
>>> of doing this? If microformats are only useful in limited contexts
>>> then their usefullness to me evaporates very quickly.
>>
>> Ah, so you prefer things that are useful everywhere? Like..?
>
> Microformats would be more useful to me if they each had a standard
> xml schema,

They do, XHTML.

> if microformat instances required a unique id in the
> context of its document,

profile uri's (I know, I know, not all microformats have profile URIs  
yet, but they should and will)

> if the microformat markup did not include
> presentation information,

It doesn't have to, but it certainly can.

> and finally if the microformat markup was
> integrated as an annotation (hidden div?)

Hidden data rots. Hidden metadata *will* get out of sync with its  
visible counterpart.

> to an XHTML element instead
> of serving double duty as XHTML presentation elements. This would let
> me cleanly repurpose and route microformats around my system without
> having to go to the trouble of teaching th

argg. My message got cut off here and the mail's not in the archive  
yet. I have a feeling that you were about to say "...trouble of  
teaching designers about semantic markup." If that's the case, then I  
would respond by saying that we actually have rather eager adoption  
among web designers (assuming they're already relatively progressive).

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 21:19:35 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 21:19:38 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <2A6D67CD-04FB-4AB4-AD9F-B71E0CAB3E84@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 7:09 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>
>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 3:15 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>> If you're saying: "Don't use that, because if you keep using if for
>> different stuff, it'll get complex."
>>
>> Then I think that statement can apply to any technology.
>
> Agreed.
>
>>> I see microformats usefulness being constrained by portability  
>>> issues
>>> relating to it being tied so closely to XHTML syntax and context.
>>
>> And which issues would those be?
>
> It seems to me that preserving the context of a microformat instance
> is tied to and requires an understanding of XHTML functionality,
> vendor inconsistancies, new and deprecated features, etc.

Once again, some specifics would help here.

>>> I also believe that a lack of common design patterns within  
>>> microformats
>>> will make it harder for developers to adopt and support it.
>>
>> We don't have common design patterns?
>
> I see a few here and there. Is there even one commonality between all
> the formats besides being their being XML?

* They reuse each other (rel-tag gets reused by xFolk, hReview, etc).
* We're working on a datetime design pattern [http://microformats.org/ 
wiki/datetime-design-pattern], so that all microformats can at least  
agree on that.
* We extend xhtml in ways which are explicitly allowed by the spec -  
class, rel, rev (rather than adding custom elements or attributes.
* They all share the same design principles [http://microformats.org/ 
wiki/microformats#the_microformats_principles]
* They're mostly structure agnostic (ie, most don't care what  
structural elements you use, just which class, rel or rev values you  
use).

I'm sure there's more, and we'll find more as time rolls on.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 21:22:07 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Mon Oct  3 21:22:11 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

Message-ID: <88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 8:42 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:

> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>
>> A quick example of something that's already happened:
>>
>> upcoming.org implemented hcalendar and hcard in about 45 minutes. Now
>> you can use X2V (http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/) to extract all that
>> information in iCal and vCard.
>
> How long did it take Brian to write, test, and debug the XSL that
> reads the format?
>
> http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/xhtml2vcal.xsl

Work in progress.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From brian.suda at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 21:52:22 2005
From: brian.suda at gmail.com (Brian Suda)
Date: Mon Oct  3 21:52:25 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
Message-ID: <21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>

> > How long did it take Brian to write, test, and debug the XSL that reads the format?
> >
> > http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/xhtml2vcal.xsl
>
> Work in progress.
>
> -ryan

Agreed, it has taken many, many hours to build, but that is partly
because it has never been done before, we are learning and discovering
as we build. Another factor is that i don't program in XSLT for a
living (as you can probably see from the code). The idea behind
choosing XSLT rather than another language, is that once this is
finished, it can easily be re-packaged into any language that has an
XSLT processor. So if you want to do hCa* in PHP, you can create an
XSLT_PROC() include this file and you are done. I imagine it would be
just as easy in a multitude of other languages or from the command
line or scripts with 'xsltproc'.

The hCal and hCard specs have been evolving alot as we slowly solve
each problem (and there are many). With each itteration the XSLT files
lose some old code, grow new, and other bits are refactored. I imagine
it will still be awhile before i declare it no longer in Beta.

I'm not sure if you expected it to be a short time to write or a long
time, but i can say it is on the latter rather than former.

If anyone is interested in the inner workings, or developing their own
applications, there is a microformats-dev list where more specific
questions may be asked, or feel free to email me directly.

-brian

--
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk
From lisa at lisarein.com  Mon Oct  3 22:31:49 2005
From: lisa at lisarein.com (Lisa Rein)
Date: Mon Oct  3 22:31:51 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

Hi guys,

In my opinion, Scott brings up a lot of good points.

Of particular concern to me is the use of the "rel" link attribute
containing the value "tag."

"rel" and "rev" are specified specifically for directional linking.
These are the values allowed withing that link attribute:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links

Other values are allowed if they are defined with a Profile:

"Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this
specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the
conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile
attribute of the HEAD element for more details."

yet the microformat method doesn't seem to use that either.
(unless there is are profiles defined somewhere that I am unaware of -
which is possible, since I'm new to the microformat space :)

Here's is more information from the HTML 4.01 spec about the use of the
"rel" attribute and directional linking:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3.1

So, if I am not mistaken, the microformat technique is not XHTML compliant.

Thanks in advance for clarifying the situation if I have misunderstood
something :-)

thanks!

lisa

>> > How long did it take Brian to write, test, and debug the XSL that
>> reads the format?
>> >
>> > http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/xhtml2vcal.xsl
>>
>> Work in progress.
>>
>> -ryan
>
> Agreed, it has taken many, many hours to build, but that is partly
> because it has never been done before, we are learning and discovering
> as we build. Another factor is that i don't program in XSLT for a
> living (as you can probably see from the code). The idea behind
> choosing XSLT rather than another language, is that once this is
> finished, it can easily be re-packaged into any language that has an
> XSLT processor. So if you want to do hCa* in PHP, you can create an
> XSLT_PROC() include this file and you are done. I imagine it would be
> just as easy in a multitude of other languages or from the command
> line or scripts with 'xsltproc'.
>
> The hCal and hCard specs have been evolving alot as we slowly solve
> each problem (and there are many). With each itteration the XSLT files
> lose some old code, grow new, and other bits are refactored. I imagine
> it will still be awhile before i declare it no longer in Beta.
>
> I'm not sure if you expected it to be a short time to write or a long
> time, but i can say it is on the latter rather than former.
>
> If anyone is interested in the inner workings, or developing their own
> applications, there is a microformats-dev list where more specific
> questions may be asked, or feel free to email me directly.
>
> -brian
>
> --
> brian suda
> http://suda.co.uk
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>

Lisa Rein
http://onlisareinsradar.com
http://www.widehive.com
http://www.lisarein.com

From pilgrim at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 22:45:56 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Mon Oct  3 22:45:59 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
	<49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510032245v7e314961q5d4af52f3261f92f@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/4/05, Lisa Rein  wrote:
> Other values are allowed if they are defined with a Profile:
> [snip]
> yet the microformat method doesn't seem to use that either.
> (unless there is are profiles defined somewhere that I am unaware of -
> which is possible, since I'm new to the microformat space :)

http://www.gmpg.org/xmdp/
http://microformats.org/wiki/reltag#XMDP_profile
http://tantek.com/presentations/2005/09/microformats-evolution/

Microformats are valid (X)HTML.  Certainly you will find examples in
the wild -- perhaps embarassingly high-profile examples -- that don't
define the profile correctly.  These examples should be fixed, and
their authors flogged.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From kmarks at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 22:46:12 2005
From: kmarks at technorati.com (Kevin Marks)
Date: Mon Oct  3 22:46:36 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
	<49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
Message-ID: 

On Oct 3, 2005, at 10:31 PM, Lisa Rein wrote:

> (unless there is are profiles defined somewhere that I am unaware of -
> which is possible, since I'm new to the microformat space :)
>
> Here's is more information from the HTML 4.01 spec about the use of the
> "rel" attribute and directional linking:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3.1

The profile is defined as part of the spec in XMDP:

  http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag#XMDP_profile

XMDP is discussed here:

http://gmpg.org/xmdp/description

From pilgrim at gmail.com  Mon Oct  3 22:59:25 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Mon Oct  3 22:59:28 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

Message-ID: <14be96d30510032259w21b368c4l2fad32a660c3c6be@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/3/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
> How long did it take Brian to write, test, and debug the XSL that
> reads the format?
>
> http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/xhtml2vcal.xsl

I would like to chime in here as the author of the second major hCard
implementation to say that I wrote the parser, the test cases, the
testing harness, and updated the documentation on the wiki in my spare
time over the course of a week.  I have a pregnant wife, a toddler
son, a book deal, and a full-time job, so my spare time is pretty
thin.

If I'd known that we were going to be playing "I can code faster than
anyone who can code better, and better than anyone who can code
faster," I would have kept better track of my time.  As it stands, we
have two independent interoperable implementations, a comprehensive
test suite, a reasonable draft of a spec-ish looking thing, and an
implementor's guide... in the course of a couple of weeks.  Pretty
soon, the amount of time spent bemoaning how difficult it is to
implement will exceed the actual time spent implementing it.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From kmarks at technorati.com  Mon Oct  3 23:04:39 2005
From: kmarks at technorati.com (Kevin Marks)
Date: Mon Oct  3 23:04:51 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Presentational markup [was Re:
	Educationg[sic] Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: 

OK, I sense a bit of a straw man, but I think it stems from a  
misunderstanding

On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> I dynamically build my XHTML documents from a mixture of content data
> and presentation data. The content markup typically gets wrapped by
> layers of presentation markup.

OK, lets stop here for a bit. What kind of presentation markup?
One goal of Microformats is to use structural markup, and defer 
presentation to CSS as far as practicable.
If you're generating nested tables with spacer gifs for spatial layout, 
I can see how you could end up with an aversion to HTML.

>  It could be that the only data I want
> to publish as a microformat is the author of a single deeply embedded
> component. How do I persist the context of the microformat instance
> that includes the author's name when the  presentation is now part of
> the context of that component? It is also typically the case that the
> presentation markup outweighs the sematic content market by 100 to 1.

You parse out the microformat data and reinsert that in your DB. Or you 
don't, you just generate a microformat so others can parse it. Just 
because the markup is reversible to your data doesn't mean you have to 
do it.

I assume your code has a common routine for every instance of an 
'author' record, so just adjust that to create an hCard instead of what 
you were using before. You can style them with CSS so they are all the 
same, or if you need style variants based on context,  apply suitable 
CSS containment rules.

> And the presentation is simply a snapshot that could change for
> whatever reason invalidating the persisted context that was presented
> to the user.
>
>>> What would be the advantages
>>> of doing this? If microformats are only useful in limited contexts
>>> then their usefullness to me evaporates very quickly.
>>
>> Ah, so you prefer things that are useful everywhere? Like..?
>
> Microformats would be more useful to me if they each had a standard
> xml schema, if microformat instances required a unique id in the
> context of its document, if the microformat markup did not include
> presentation information, and finally if the microformat markup was
> integrated as an annotation (hidden div?) to an XHTML element instead
> of serving double duty as XHTML presentation elements.

They are structural elements. Can you show me these alleged 
presentation elements in any extant microformat?

As for generality, the discussion ongoing about XOXO and tabular forms 
are designed to act as more flexible cases.

In particular, XOXO will let you represent reversibly the kinds of 
nested list and dictionary structures common in scripting languages 
such as Python, PHP and Perl.

From lisa at lisarein.com  Mon Oct  3 23:05:09 2005
From: lisa at lisarein.com (Lisa Rein)
Date: Mon Oct  3 23:05:18 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
	<49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

Message-ID: <49799.71.130.231.201.1128405909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

Hey Kevin and Mark,

Thanks for the links. They help a bit. But I'm still a bit confused by
this example:

 rel

     HTML4 definition of the 'rel' attribute.
   Here is an additional value.

   tag
   Indicates that the referred resource serves as a "tag",
       or keyword/subject, for the referring page.

Perhaps if I saw a completed "microformatted" document, with the profile
defined within the "head" element, I could understand better:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#profiles

Could you please point me to some of these? (I assume there are many)

thanks!

lisa

> On Oct 3, 2005, at 10:31 PM, Lisa Rein wrote:
>
>> (unless there is are profiles defined somewhere that I am unaware of -
>> which is possible, since I'm new to the microformat space :)
>>
>> Here's is more information from the HTML 4.01 spec about the use of the
>> "rel" attribute and directional linking:
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3.1
>
> The profile is defined as part of the spec in XMDP:
>
>   http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag#XMDP_profile
>
> XMDP is discussed here:
>
> http://gmpg.org/xmdp/description
>
>

Lisa Rein
http://onlisareinsradar.com
http://www.widehive.com
http://www.lisarein.com

From vilky at yandex.ru  Mon Oct  3 23:12:55 2005
From: vilky at yandex.ru (=?KOI8-R?B?Iu/T1MHQIOLSxcTAIg==?=)
Date: Mon Oct  3 23:13:01 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Fiction books microformats
Message-ID: <43421D67.000005.21388@colgate.yandex.ru>

Do anybody cultivate XHTML-microformat for fiction books on web?
From vilky at yandex.ru  Tue Oct  4 00:17:11 2005
From: vilky at yandex.ru (Vilky F.)
Date: Tue Oct  4 00:17:34 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Versions for XHTML1.x and for XHTML 2.0
Message-ID: <43422C77.000002.24902@tide.yandex.ru>

Maybe microformats convention documents create in two variants: for XHTML1.x and for XHTML 2.0?
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Tue Oct  4 00:44:07 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Tue Oct  4 00:44:11 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510032259w21b368c4l2fad32a660c3c6be@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>		<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>	
	<14be96d30510032259w21b368c4l2fad32a660c3c6be@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <434232C7.5040306@blogmatrix.com>

Just so this doesn't get lost in history, I wrote and released a 
Greasemonkey hcard/hcalendar/xfolk parser two months ago.

I won't claim it's the most beautiful piece of code ever written -- it's 
my first GM script -- but it was done.

http://www.blogmatrix.com/include/microformat-find.user.js

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

Mark Pilgrim wrote:
> 
> I would like to chime in here as the author of the second major hCard
> implementation to say that I wrote the parser, the test cases, the
> testing harness, and updated the documentation on the wiki in my spare
> time over the course of a week.  I have a pregnant wife, a toddler
> son, a book deal, and a full-time job, so my spare time is pretty
> thin.
> 
> If I'd known that we were going to be playing "I can code faster than
> anyone who can code better, and better than anyone who can code
> faster," I would have kept better track of my time.  As it stands, we
> have two independent interoperable implementations, a comprehensive
> test suite, a reasonable draft of a spec-ish looking thing, and an
> implementor's guide... in the course of a couple of weeks.  Pretty
> soon, the amount of time spent bemoaning how difficult it is to
> implement will exceed the actual time spent implementing it.
> 
> --
> Cheers,
> -Mark
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
> 
> 

From solitude at solitude.dk  Tue Oct  4 01:00:55 2005
From: solitude at solitude.dk (Andreas Haugstrup)
Date: Tue Oct  4 01:01:03 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] xFolk parser in PHP
Message-ID: 

Hey,

Has anyone written an xFolk parser in PHP? I'm a part of a group who wants  
to do tag sharing between services and we're trying out a ping+pull  
scenario that uses xFolk for the data. I'm no programmer and while I have  
created a parser in PHP, I'm also quite certain it's going to fail  
unexpectedly at some point.

- Andreas
-- 

Commentary on media, communication, culture and technology.
From bud at thecommunityengine.com  Tue Oct  4 03:13:24 2005
From: bud at thecommunityengine.com (Bud Gibson)
Date: Tue Oct  4 03:13:25 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] xFolk parser in PHP
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <008476D6-B3AA-4770-A663-B26572717CEB@thecommunityengine.com>

Andreas:

I know of no xFolk Parser in PHP.  I have however written xFolk  
parsers in javascript.  I have discussion of those here:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/07/greasemonkey_mi.html

and here:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/09/vegomatic_an_al.html

I have also linked between tagging services as I describe here:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/09/a_tag_based_lea.html

and here:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/09/a_tag_cloud_int.html

In a nutshell, I think there are really three generic parser  
strategies to pursue.  One is to treat your html document as xml and  
apply tools like XPath and XSLT.  The second is to somehow create a  
DOM tree and then walk it.  Both of these strategies are easily  
applied in browsers which essentially go through the pain of parsing  
the html file for you and give you a data structure to work with.   
XPath and XSLT are most easily applied to html documents in firefox  
while DOM walking applies to both firefox and ie.  The third parser  
strategy is to really go low level and scan the document like it was  
a text file.

As for creating a cross-service tag aggregator, I have both just used  
the RSS feeds and have used client side javascript processing of html  
pages.

If you have more specific questions, I'll be happy to take a crack.

Bud
On Oct 4, 2005, at 4:00, Andreas Haugstrup wrote:

> Hey,
>
> Has anyone written an xFolk parser in PHP? I'm a part of a group  
> who wants to do tag sharing between services and we're trying out a  
> ping+pull scenario that uses xFolk for the data. I'm no programmer  
> and while I have created a parser in PHP, I'm also quite certain  
> it's going to fail unexpectedly at some point.
>
> - Andreas
> -- 
> 
> Commentary on media, communication, culture and technology.
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>
>

From bryanjbusch at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 06:26:12 2005
From: bryanjbusch at gmail.com (Bryan J Busch)
Date: Tue Oct  4 06:26:18 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Versions for XHTML1.x and for XHTML 2.0
In-Reply-To: <43422C77.000002.24902@tide.yandex.ru>
References: <43422C77.000002.24902@tide.yandex.ru>
Message-ID: 

I've thought of that, too, but it's probably not worth it until XHTML
2.0 progresses from "working draft" status:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/

On 10/4/05, Vilky F.  wrote:
> Maybe microformats convention documents create in two variants: for XHTML1.x and for XHTML 2.0?
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 06:52:37 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Tue Oct  4 06:52:40 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <434232C7.5040306@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<14be96d30510032259w21b368c4l2fad32a660c3c6be@mail.gmail.com>
	<434232C7.5040306@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510040652y616f086bm39aac1d5d266bc97@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/4/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> Just so this doesn't get lost in history, I wrote and released a
> Greasemonkey hcard/hcalendar/xfolk parser two months ago.
>
> http://www.blogmatrix.com/include/microformat-find.user.js

Yeah, it's unfortunate that your script was 404 when I was starting
mine, or perhaps we could have collaborated.

http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-September/000895.html

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Tue Oct  4 09:21:00 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Tue Oct  4 09:21:09 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Fiction books microformats
In-Reply-To: <43421D67.000005.21388@colgate.yandex.ru>
References: <43421D67.000005.21388@colgate.yandex.ru>
Message-ID: <811E9604-54F6-48ED-99F0-D90035BCE8D0@opendarwin.org>

Hi ?????,
On Oct 3, 2005, at 11:12 PM, ????? ????? wrote:

> Do anybody cultivate XHTML-microformat for fiction books on web?

I don't know if there's enough examples to make for a genre, or  
'fiction' is a meaningful-enough category.

There's lots of components that *might* be useful (e.g., tagging  
dialogue with cite/quote), but could also be overkill.

A better question might what kind of structure do you want.  Are  
there parts, chapters, subheadings that need to be regularized?  Or  
is really just one massive HTML document, not really different than  
any other document?

-- Ernie P.

> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss

From drernie at opendarwin.org  Tue Oct  4 09:23:36 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Tue Oct  4 09:23:41 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Versions for XHTML1.x and for XHTML 2.0
In-Reply-To: 
References: <43422C77.000002.24902@tide.yandex.ru>

Message-ID: <4C3ABCCA-619F-41AA-9072-B52EB3FFDEF4@opendarwin.org>

Hi Bryan et al,

On Oct 4, 2005, at 6:26 AM, Bryan J Busch wrote:

> I've thought of that, too, but it's probably not worth it until XHTML
> 2.0 progresses from "working draft" status:

Could someone who understands these things please educate me on this:

"Integration with the Semantic Web: make XHTML2 amenable for  
processing with semantic web tools."

Does that mean microformat-style semantic tagging, or a more RDF-like  
embedding?  Or something else entirely?  Or does nobody yet know?

-- Ernie P.

>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/
>
> On 10/4/05, Vilky F.  wrote:
>> Maybe microformats convention documents create in two variants:  
>> for XHTML1.x and for XHTML 2.0?
>> _______________________________________________
>> microformats-discuss mailing list
>> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
>> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss

From ryan at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 10:58:13 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Tue Oct  4 10:58:21 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] xFolk parser in PHP
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <05939D2B-AC3E-44BB-BF11-32E10EBFDCE7@technorati.com>

I know of nothing specifically for xFolk, but you could probably use  
Assaf's Micro Content Parser:

http://trac.labnotes.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/MicroParserPHP

-ryan

On Oct 4, 2005, at 1:00 AM, Andreas Haugstrup wrote:

> Hey,
>
> Has anyone written an xFolk parser in PHP? I'm a part of a group  
> who wants to do tag sharing between services and we're trying out a  
> ping+pull scenario that uses xFolk for the data. I'm no programmer  
> and while I have created a parser in PHP, I'm also quite certain  
> it's going to fail unexpectedly at some point.
>
> - Andreas
> -- 
> 
> Commentary on media, communication, culture and technology.
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://micr

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 11:03:12 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Tue Oct  4 11:03:17 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <49799.71.130.231.201.1128405909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
	<49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

	<49799.71.130.231.201.1128405909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
Message-ID: 

On Oct 3, 2005, at 11:05 PM, Lisa Rein wrote:
> Hey Kevin and Mark,
>
> Thanks for the links. They help a bit. But I'm still a bit confused by
> this example:
>
> 
>  rel
>  
>     href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-rel">
>      HTML4 definition of the 'rel' attribute.
>    Here is an additional value.
>   
>    tag
>    Indicates that the referred resource serves as a "tag",
>        or keyword/subject, for the referring page.
>   
>  
> 
>
> Perhaps if I saw a completed "microformatted" document, with the  
> profile
> defined within the "head" element, I could understand better:

The above example is a *profile*.

> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#profiles
>
> Could you please point me to some of these? (I assume there are many)

Unfortunately, we don't have profiles for all microformats yet (any  
volunteers for hCalendar? :D). Also, for rel-tag, we haven't pushed  
for people to use the profile URIs (hmm, and we don't even have a  
profile URI for rel-tag).

But for a quick example you can look at my blog [http:// 
theryanking.com], where you can find

which refers to the xfn profile.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From tantek at cs.stanford.edu  Tue Oct  4 11:35:37 2005
From: tantek at cs.stanford.edu (Tantek =?ISO-8859-1?B?xw==?=elik)
Date: Tue Oct  4 11:35:51 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
Message-ID: 

On 10/4/05 11:03 AM, "Ryan King"  wrote:

> On Oct 3, 2005, at 11:05 PM, Lisa Rein wrote:
>> Perhaps if I saw a completed "microformatted" document, with the
>> profile
>> defined within the "head" element, I could understand better:
> 
> But for a quick example you can look at my blog [http://
> theryanking.com], where you can find
> 
> 
> 
> which refers to the xfn profile.

That's right.

In fact, all Wordpress installs since like version 1.1 or so explicitly
reference the XFN profile, as well as provide a UI for editing the
relationships to people in your blogroll.

Thanks,

Tantek

From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 12:16:05 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Tue Oct  4 12:16:08 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
	<14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510041216k6a9e08fbt830ceacd37750555@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/4/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:

> Eventually all of these will come together in a super-script that
> parses all available data in every page you ever browse, and publishes
> it to your own private Atom Store via the Atom API.  (This part is
> already written as well, though unreleased.)

Looking forward to the release!

I'd note that this is very similar in approach to the work that's been
done with PiggyBank/SemanticBank, though over there it's pretty much
RDF through-and-through.
(which is a point - what are you doing for a data model for the
multi-domain data?).
http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/index.html
http://simile.mit.edu/semantic-bank/index.html

One new (work-in-progress) bit, which I think kind-of parallels the
Greasemonkey stuff, is this:
http://simile.mit.edu/solvent/

> Imagine having your own private database of every person you've ever
> stumbled across online, and being able to download their vCards into
> your address book.  And every event, which you can download into
> iCal/Sunbird/Outlook.  Plus a list of all the Creative
> Commons-licensed content you've ever read, which you can repurpose --
> legally, according to the terms of the license.
>
> Now imagine searching such a database.  And subscribing to your search
> results as a syndicated feed.
>
> It's coming.  Within weeks, not years.  All the data is out there;
> people are publishing this stuff anyway.  If they publish it just 1%
> better (with appropriate microformatting), I can get 1000% more out of
> it.
>
> Or do you just use your browser to browse?  That's so 20th century.

Yes, yes, yes to all that. And more ;-)

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Tue Oct  4 12:23:45 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Tue Oct  4 12:24:15 2005
Subject: profiles Re: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
	<49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

	<49799.71.130.231.201.1128405909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

Message-ID: 

Hi Ryan,

On Oct 4, 2005, at 11:03 AM, Ryan King wrote:
> Unfortunately, we don't have profiles for all microformats yet (any  
> volunteers for hCalendar? :D). Also, for rel-tag, we haven't pushed  
> for people to use the profile URIs (hmm, and we don't even have a  
> profile URI for rel-tag).

This seems like the sort of housekeeping stuff which tends to be low  
priority, but is actually fairly helpful in getting people oriented.  
I know it confused me when I first got into this (assuming I'm  
unconfused now, of course :-).

I personally would find it worthwhile if someone created a Top Ten  
Things Newbies Can Do  list, to help focus volunteer activity. Right  
now, the ToDo page is so chaotic I honestly don't know where to begin.

http://microformats.org/wiki/to-do

-- Ernie P.
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 12:25:01 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Tue Oct  4 12:25:05 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510041225j4f32a6f1k22ccfb86d47a7243@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/4/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:

> If I do need to support a secondary format that gets used to generate
> microformats in my XHTML does anyone know of a good candidate for this
> besides RDF?

Topic Maps (XTM) may be worth considering.

> Note to Danny: I will be looking into how to map RDF to my JSR 170
> content repository. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how
> best to approach this task. I would need to define some custom node
> types. (http://www.jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr170/)

Considered me interested. I came across JSR 170 not long ago, comments:
http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/09/02/need-for-a-data-manamagement-system-spec/

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From portletdev at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 14:01:35 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Tue Oct  4 14:01:38 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> > I dynamically build my XHTML documents from a mixture of content data
> > and presentation data. The content markup typically gets wrapped by
> > layers of presentation markup. It could be that the only data I want
> > to publish as a microformat is the author of a single deeply embedded
> > component. How do I persist the context of the microformat instance
> > that includes the author's name when the  presentation is now part of
> > the context of that component? It is also typically the case that the
> > presentation markup outweighs the sematic content market by 100 to 1.
> > And the presentation is simply a snapshot that could change for
> > whatever reason invalidating the persisted context that was presented
> > to the user.
>
> I don't follow you here. A concrete example would be more useful.
>

A content provider may want to add many instances of microformats
within a single XHTML document. There could be multiple instances of a
particular type of microformat in this document and some microformat
instances could be related to each other in some way. Say I want to
create a tool that understands the content in XHTML documents that
support microformats. As I see it, the only information I have
available for understanding the meaning of one of these microformat
instances is its "xhtml context"; where in the document the data
resides. This context could be interpreted by starting at the
microformat element and walking up its parent elements capturing their
name, class, and other attributes along the way.

In a world where every XHTML document is semantically legible this
would not be a problem. This is not the world we live in and it will
not soon change, if ever. So here I am with this "xhtml context" that
includes a lot of pretty useless information that could change for
reasons that have nothing to do with how a human would use contextual
information to logically interpret the meaning of a particular
microformat instance. I want
content providers and designers to be able to establish a "semantic
context" for a microformat instance that is independant of but related
to the actual "xhtml context" of the microformat instance.

You wanted an example. Say I defined a "semantic context" to be a
microformat implemented as a span element with class="context"...

      [help controls presentation + help content references defined
with microformats]

      [navigation panel presentation + navigation controls defined
with microformats]

            [tool bar presentation + tools defined with microformats]

                     [microformats about author of content-0]

                     [microformats about author of content-1]

         [presentation provided by adivertising service + ads defined
with microformat spam]

 can be seen as a default semantic context. I suppose so could
. Semantic contexts would not be needed for simple documents
containing only one microformat instance or one list of microformats.
I am trying to throw something out there that is as simple as possible
to demonstrate a point. I suppose that XOXO lists could be made to
serve as semantic contexts but the point is that the logical
(semantic) context stays intact despite changes to the physical
(xhtml) context.

The above example attempts to demonstrate the establishment of the
following semantic contexts. I am going to stipulate that to get this
to cleanly work I will need a requirement that all microformat
instances support a unique id. However, this may not be necessary to
still obtain benefits from this suggested enhancement. That said, if
there were a unique id requirement I could provide my users support
for subscribing to a semantic context via an Atom feed and they could
monitor individual microformat instances migrating from one semantic
context to another within the same XHTML document. Anyway, here is
that list of contexts...

/body/
/body/help/
/body/navigation/
/body/navigation/history (represents an example path to history
control, a microformat instance)
/body/workspace/
/body/workspace/tools/
/body/workspace/content/
/body/workspace/content/0
/body/workspace/content/1
/body/ads

BTW, when I was thinking about this solution the topic of
accessibility kept coming up.

> > Microformats would be more useful to me if they each had a standard
> > xml schema,
>
> They do, XHTML.
>

I still need to personally teach my software to understand each and
every new microformat that I want to support. It would be better if
the software could read a schema that captured the semantics of a
microformat and thus teach itself the meaning of new formats as they
appear.

> > if microformat instances required a unique id in the
> > context of its document,
>
> profile uri's (I know, I know, not all microformats have profile URIs
> yet, but they should and will)

This would provide tools that consume microformats an indicator as to
what type of microformat they were dealing with and perhaps an
opportunity for a hosted schema but that is not what I mean by unique
id. This would be used to track a microformat instance within an XHTML
document. It could also be used as a globally unique identifer when
combined with the URL of its document.

> > to an XHTML element instead
> > of serving double duty as XHTML presentation elements. This would let
> > me cleanly repurpose and route microformats around my system without
> > having to go to the trouble of teaching th
>
>
> argg. My message got cut off here and the mail's not in the archive
> yet. I have a feeling that you were about to say "...trouble of
> teaching designers about semantic markup." If that's the case, then I
> would respond by saying that we actually have rather eager adoption
> among web designers (assuming they're already relatively progressive).

Nope, the last sentance was...

> This would let me cleanly repurpose and route microformats around my
> system without having to go to the trouble of teaching the system to
> understand what they are.

I don't see teaching designers to produce microformats being a
bottleneck to your solution. I see the bottleneck being the difficulty
in teaching software to consume and make sense of microformats. It is
my hope that sematic contexts could help with this bottleneck while
also enabling new applications for microformats.
From luke.arno at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 14:23:51 2005
From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno)
Date: Tue Oct  4 14:23:55 2005
Subject: profiles Re: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
	<49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

	<49799.71.130.231.201.1128405909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

Message-ID: 

+1, Dr. E.

I also would like to do more but am still lite on context. I would be
happy to sweep the floors a bit.

- Luke

On 10/4/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
>
> On Oct 4, 2005, at 11:03 AM, Ryan King wrote:
> > Unfortunately, we don't have profiles for all microformats yet (any
> > volunteers for hCalendar? :D). Also, for rel-tag, we haven't pushed
> > for people to use the profile URIs (hmm, and we don't even have a
> > profile URI for rel-tag).
>
> This seems like the sort of housekeeping stuff which tends to be low
> priority, but is actually fairly helpful in getting people oriented.
> I know it confused me when I first got into this (assuming I'm
> unconfused now, of course :-).
>
> I personally would find it worthwhile if someone created a Top Ten
> Things Newbies Can Do  list, to help focus volunteer activity. Right
> now, the ToDo page is so chaotic I honestly don't know where to begin.
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/to-do
>
> -- Ernie P.
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>
From portletdev at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 14:26:31 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Tue Oct  4 14:26:33 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> > How long did it take Brian to write, test, and debug the XSL that
> > reads the format?
> >
> > http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/xhtml2vcal.xsl
>
> Work in progress.

I think you should be listening to Brian for ideas on making this task
easier. I think this will turn out to be a much bigger project than
anyone thinks. To get to a reasonable usable API might require a
pretty robust and evolved XSL framework.
From portletdev at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 14:36:51 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Tue Oct  4 14:36:55 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
	<49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
Message-ID: 

Brian Suda wrote:
> > I'm not sure if you expected it to be a short time to write or a long
> > time, but i can say it is on the latter rather than former.

I would expect that it would take a very long time to come up with a
complete general solution, an API that is reusable and customizable
without having to learn the complicated low level stuff.

I'd be interested in hearing about the assumptions that you are having
to make about the structure of the XHTML documents you are processing.
Also any thoughts on issues relating to microformat localization,
versioning, or validation as it relates to security would be welcome.
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Tue Oct  4 14:37:42 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Tue Oct  4 14:37:53 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>

Message-ID: <2F88707B-F453-4B0B-8470-12081686BCA1@opendarwin.org>

Hi Scott,

On Oct 4, 2005, at 2:26 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>>> How long did it take Brian to write, test, and debug the XSL that
>>> reads the format?
>>>
>>> http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/xhtml2vcal.xsl
>>
>> Work in progress.
>
> I think you should be listening to Brian for ideas on making this task
> easier. I think this will turn out to be a much bigger project than
> anyone thinks. To get to a reasonable usable API might require a
> pretty robust and evolved XSL framework.

You make some valid points, but I think its helpful to set some  
context and expectations.

I get the feeling that microformats does *not* map cleanly onto your  
desired usage model.   Yes, clearly microformats *do* need to become  
more robust, better documented, and more explicitly specified.    
However, I'm getting a sense that you're saying:

"Microformats as they are now are pretty useless for my purposes, so  
please make them more like a rigorous XML schema."

Is that the message you intend to convey?   While that's certainly a  
valid point of view (and we have something to learn from that), I get  
the feeling that you don't quite (yet) understand the 'zen' of  
microformats, or why those issues which appear central to you are in  
fact quite peripheral to the main attraction of microformats.

I'm not saying that's your fault -- we as a community have a long way  
to go in terms of articulating things more clearly, despite Tantek's  
heroic work to date.  However, I suspect that there's a major  
difference between what you want and where the community is, and  
trying to 'force-fit' the two -- at least right now -- could lead to  
mutual frustration.

I'd love to be proved wrong, but I also wanted to sound a cautionary  
note lest these misunderstandings get out of hand.

Best regards,
- Ernie P.

From portletdev at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 14:52:09 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Tue Oct  4 14:52:12 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510032259w21b368c4l2fad32a660c3c6be@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<14be96d30510032259w21b368c4l2fad32a660c3c6be@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/3/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:
> If I'd known that we were going to be playing "I can code faster than
> anyone who can code better, and better than anyone who can code
> faster," I would have kept better track of my time.

If I gave you this impression by simply asking how long it took Brian
to code that XSL then you should probably apply those thought
processes on where this defensive rebuke came from. In my opinion this
task can and should be made easier. That was my point in asking.

> As it stands, we
> have two independent interoperable implementations, a comprehensive
> test suite, a reasonable draft of a spec-ish looking thing, and an
> implementor's guide... in the course of a couple of weeks.  Pretty
> soon, the amount of time spent bemoaning how difficult it is to
> implement will exceed the actual time spent implementing it.

So I am not the first to engage in bemoaning. No surprise there.
From ryan at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 15:07:39 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:07:42 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>

Message-ID: 

On Oct 4, 2005, at 2:26 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>
>>> How long did it take Brian to write, test, and debug the XSL that
>>> reads the format?
>>>
>>> http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/xhtml2vcal.xsl
>>
>> Work in progress.
>
> I think you should be listening to Brian for ideas on making this task
> easier.

Um, I think we talk every day.

> I think this will turn out to be a much bigger project than
> anyone thinks. To get to a reasonable usable API might require a
> pretty robust and evolved XSL framework.

The API's already there, usable and quite robust. What more are you  
looking for?

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From portletdev at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 15:14:52 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:14:55 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510041225j4f32a6f1k22ccfb86d47a7243@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>

	<1f2ed5cd0510041225j4f32a6f1k22ccfb86d47a7243@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/4/05, Danny Ayers  wrote:
> On 10/4/05, Scott Anderson  wrote:
>
> > If I do need to support a secondary format that gets used to generate
> > microformats in my XHTML does anyone know of a good candidate for this
> > besides RDF?
>
> Topic Maps (XTM) may be worth considering.
>

I will look into these.

> > Note to Danny: I will be looking into how to map RDF to my JSR 170
> > content repository. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how
> > best to approach this task. I would need to define some custom node
> > types. (http://www.jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr170/)
>
> Considered me interested. I came across JSR 170 not long ago, comments:
> http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/09/02/need-for-a-data-manamagement-system-spec/
>

I have an Apache Jackrabbit implementation running within a Spring IoC
framework that is driven by an Apache Geronimo kernel. I am to the
point where I need to define a higher level, more defined content
model on top of the low level and open-ended JSR 170 model. Oh, I am
also investigating how to present a user interface for JSR 170
workspaces to content authors.

Whenever you have the time to invest in getting up to speed on JSR 170
(I am available for questions) and are to the point where you have
something worth trying out, just let me know.

I thought a reasonable first step to establishing a content model was
a JSR 170 browser/editor which is what I will be focused on after
extricating myself from this thread. I can add any of your modeling on
top. BTW, I also have integrated ROME into the mix so that is
available for CMS I/O. Jackrabbit has support for Lucene search and an
XPath like syntax.

I am open sourcing all this stuff under the Apache 2.0 license.
From ryan at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 15:15:00 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:15:06 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

Message-ID: <9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>

On Oct 4, 2005, at 2:01 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>>
>>> I dynamically build my XHTML documents from a mixture of content  
>>> data
>>> and presentation data. The content markup typically gets wrapped by
>>> layers of presentation markup. It could be that the only data I want
>>> to publish as a microformat is the author of a single deeply  
>>> embedded
>>> component. How do I persist the context of the microformat instance
>>> that includes the author's name when the  presentation is now  
>>> part of
>>> the context of that component? It is also typically the case that  
>>> the
>>> presentation markup outweighs the sematic content market by 100  
>>> to 1.
>>> And the presentation is simply a snapshot that could change for
>>> whatever reason invalidating the persisted context that was  
>>> presented
>>> to the user.
>>
>> I don't follow you here. A concrete example would be more useful.
>
> A content provider may want to add many instances of microformats
> within a single XHTML document. There could be multiple instances of a
> particular type of microformat in this document and some microformat
> instances could be related to each other in some way. Say I want to
> create a tool that understands the content in XHTML documents that
> support microformats. As I see it, the only information I have
> available for understanding the meaning of one of these microformat
> instances is its "xhtml context"; where in the document the data
> resides. This context could be interpreted by starting at the
> microformat element and walking up its parent elements capturing their
> name, class, and other attributes along the way.

Um, this is still theoretical, not concrete. But let me try to answer  
anyway..

Sure, "microformat instances" can relate to each other- they can be  
included within each other and be linked to by each other. Context  
may be important in some applications, but the context information  
necessary for each application will be different, and therefore  
determined by that particular application.

> In a world where every XHTML document is semantically legible this
> would not be a problem. This is not the world we live in and it will
> not soon change, if ever. So here I am with this "xhtml context" that
> includes a lot of pretty useless information that could change for
> reasons that have nothing to do with how a human would use contextual
> information to logically interpret the meaning of a particular
> microformat instance. I want
> content providers and designers to be able to establish a "semantic
> context" for a microformat instance that is independant of but related
> to the actual "xhtml context" of the microformat instance.
>
> You wanted an example. Say I defined a "semantic context" to be a
> microformat implemented as a span element with class="context"...
>
> 
>    
>       [help controls presentation + help content references defined
> with microformats]
>    
>    
>       [navigation panel presentation + navigation controls defined
> with microformats]
>    
>    
>       
>          
>             [tool bar presentation + tools defined with microformats]
>          
>          
>             
>                
>                      [microformats about author of content-0]
>                   
>                
>             
>             
>                
>                      [microformats about author of content-1]
>                   
>                
>             
>          
>       
>       
>          [presentation provided by adivertising service + ads defined
> with microformat spam]
>       
>    
> 
>
>  can be seen as a default semantic context. I suppose so could
> . Semantic contexts would not be needed for simple documents
> containing only one microformat instance or one list of microformats.
> I am trying to throw something out there that is as simple as possible
> to demonstrate a point. I suppose that XOXO lists could be made to
> serve as semantic contexts but the point is that the logical
> (semantic) context stays intact despite changes to the physical
> (xhtml) context.

Whoa. What do we need these contexts for? Which microformats need to  
be enclosed in a specific context?

> The above example attempts to demonstrate the establishment of the
> following semantic contexts. I am going to stipulate that to get this
> to cleanly work I will need a requirement that all microformat
> instances support a unique id.

Good practice, but will not be required.

> However, this may not be necessary to
> still obtain benefits from this suggested enhancement. That said, if
> there were a unique id requirement I could provide my users support
> for subscribing to a semantic context via an Atom feed and they could
> monitor individual microformat instances migrating from one semantic
> context to another within the same XHTML document. Anyway, here is
> that list of contexts...
>
> /body/
> /body/help/
> /body/navigation/
> /body/navigation/history (represents an example path to history
> control, a microformat instance)
> /body/workspace/
> /body/workspace/tools/
> /body/workspace/content/
> /body/workspace/content/0
> /body/workspace/content/1
> /body/ads
>
> BTW, when I was thinking about this solution the topic of
> accessibility kept coming up.
>
>
>>> Microformats would be more useful to me if they each had a standard
>>> xml schema,
>>>
>>
>> They do, XHTML.
>>
>>
>
> I still need to personally teach my software to understand each and
> every new microformat that I want to support. It would be better if
> the software could read a schema that captured the semantics of a
> microformat and thus teach itself the meaning of new formats as they
> appear.
>
>
>>> if microformat instances required a unique id in the
>>> context of its document,
>>>
>>
>> profile uri's (I know, I know, not all microformats have profile URIs
>> yet, but they should and will)
>>
>
> This would provide tools that consume microformats an indicator as to
> what type of microformat they were dealing with and perhaps an
> opportunity for a hosted schema but that is not what I mean by unique
> id. This would be used to track a microformat instance within an XHTML
> document. It could also be used as a globally unique identifer when
> combined with the URL of its document.

Of course. Nothing new here, I suggest you read the archives on this  
one.

>>> to an XHTML element instead
>>> of serving double duty as XHTML presentation elements. This would  
>>> let
>>> me cleanly repurpose and route microformats around my system without
>>> having to go to the trouble of teaching th
>>
>>
>> argg. My message got cut off here and the mail's not in the archive
>> yet. I have a feeling that you were about to say "...trouble of
>> teaching designers about semantic markup." If that's the case, then I
>> would respond by saying that we actually have rather eager adoption
>> among web designers (assuming they're already relatively  
>> progressive).
>
> Nope, the last sentance was...
>
>
>> This would let me cleanly repurpose and route microformats around my
>> system without having to go to the trouble of teaching the system to
>> understand what they are.
>
> I don't see teaching designers to produce microformats being a
> bottleneck to your solution. I see the bottleneck being the difficulty
> in teaching software to consume and make sense of microformats. It is
> my hope that sematic contexts could help with this bottleneck while
> also enabling new applications for microformats.

I really don't know what you're tyring to get at here, Scott (and I  
don't think I'm the only one not getting it).

I admit, there's a lot to learn with microformats, some of which may  
seem like "koolaid" that must be taken on faith, but trust me, we  
thought a lot of things through and if you question them we're like  
to have thought-out answers.

Whatever it is you're trying to accomplish here, it seems very  
boiling-the-ocean-ish; you still haven't described a concrete usage  
scenario, without which we can't really talk about solutions.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 15:17:39 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:17:43 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>
	<21e770780510032152r261f8db0w3228bf7b378fa78f@mail.gmail.com>
	<49678.71.130.231.201.1128403909.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

Message-ID: 

On Oct 4, 2005, at 2:36 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:

> Brian Suda wrote:
>
>>> I'm not sure if you expected it to be a short time to write or a  
>>> long
>>> time, but i can say it is on the latter rather than former.
>>>
>
> I would expect

Don't guess, ask or try.

> that it would take a very long time to come up with a
> complete general solution, an API that is reusable and customizable
> without having to learn the complicated low level stuff.

This statement is uninformed.

> I'd be interested in hearing about the assumptions that you are having
> to make about the structure of the XHTML documents you are processing.

Where does it appear that we're making assumptions?

> Also any thoughts on issues relating to microformat localization,

You can create microformated content in any language.

> versioning,

The formats can be versioned (see http://microformats.org/wiki/ 
hreview for an example)

> or validation

Currently validation is done by attempting to parse the formats  
(which is how you always do validation)

> as it relates to security would be welcome.

Out of scope.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From lisa at lisarein.com  Tue Oct  4 15:19:08 2005
From: lisa at lisarein.com (Lisa Rein)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:19:11 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 

Message-ID: <50363.63.193.123.50.1128464348.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

Are you saying that Wordpress 1.1 + has a working Microformat
implementation? Yippie :-)

Where can I find the reference mechanism, and how can I get to the UI
editing screen? (I have wordpress loaded up right now...)

thanks!

lisa

> On 10/4/05 11:03 AM, "Ryan King"  wrote:
>
>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 11:05 PM, Lisa Rein wrote:
>>> Perhaps if I saw a completed "microformatted" document, with the
>>> profile
>>> defined within the "head" element, I could understand better:
>>
>> But for a quick example you can look at my blog [http://
>> theryanking.com], where you can find
>>
>> 
>>
>> which refers to the xfn profile.
>
> That's right.
>
> In fact, all Wordpress installs since like version 1.1 or so explicitly
> reference the XFN profile, as well as provide a UI for editing the
> relationships to people in your blogroll.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tantek
>
>

Lisa Rein
http://onlisareinsradar.com
http://www.widehive.com
http://www.lisarein.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 15:25:30 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:25:35 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <50363.63.193.123.50.1128464348.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
References: 

	<50363.63.193.123.50.1128464348.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
Message-ID: <5AEDDD81-9C41-421B-A8CD-52F775208ED0@technorati.com>

On Oct 4, 2005, at 3:19 PM, Lisa Rein wrote:

> Are you saying that Wordpress 1.1 + has a working Microformat
> implementation? Yippie :-)

They have for several years and they're not the only ones: http:// 
microformats.org/wiki/implementations

> Where can I find the reference mechanism,

not sure you need one.

> and how can I get to the UI
> editing screen? (I have wordpress loaded up right now...)

Links -> Add Link

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From portletdev at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 15:30:55 2005
From: portletdev at gmail.com (Scott Anderson)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:30:57 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <2F88707B-F453-4B0B-8470-12081686BCA1@opendarwin.org>
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>

	<2F88707B-F453-4B0B-8470-12081686BCA1@opendarwin.org>
Message-ID: 

On 10/4/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> I get the feeling that microformats does *not* map cleanly onto your
> desired usage model.   Yes, clearly microformats *do* need to become
> more robust, better documented, and more explicitly specified.
> However, I'm getting a sense that you're saying:
>
> "Microformats as they are now are pretty useless for my purposes, so
> please make them more like a rigorous XML schema."
>

I think microformats are of limited use to me. It is not because of a
lack of xml schemas (or their equivalent). I can work around
that...more of a productivity issue.

I am having problems understanding the intended applications for
microformats. The examples I have seen from others are not compelling
value adds. I would like to be able to inspect an XHTML document and
be able to understand its semantics using some additional contextual
meta data in the same way that google site maps are used to understand
the structure of a web site.

> Is that the message you intend to convey?   While that's certainly a
> valid point of view (and we have something to learn from that), I get
> the feeling that you don't quite (yet) understand the 'zen' of
> microformats, or why those issues which appear central to you are in
> fact quite peripheral to the main attraction of microformats.
>

It is true that I don't understand the zen of microformats. I am
simply applying my experience as to how interface designers and
content providers would want to adopt this technology in attempt to
understand what type of tools they might need.

> I'm not saying that's your fault -- we as a community have a long way
> to go in terms of articulating things more clearly, despite Tantek's
> heroic work to date.  However, I suspect that there's a major
> difference between what you want and where the community is, and
> trying to 'force-fit' the two -- at least right now -- could lead to
> mutual frustration.
>

It is true that I don't know where the community is.

> I'd love to be proved wrong, but I also wanted to sound a cautionary
> note lest these misunderstandings get out of hand.
>

Thanks.
From lisa at lisarein.com  Tue Oct  4 15:40:45 2005
From: lisa at lisarein.com (Lisa Rein)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:40:47 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
Message-ID: <50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>

I understand *exactly* what Scott's getting at here. It's quite
fundamental, really. I think he did a great job at taking a stab at fixing
the problem that I was just about to send an email out on, so here goes.

But first things first. RE: profiles. Then I will get back to namespaces
and/or Scott's elegant attempt at providing context for the different
namespaces using span tags, etc. And demonstrating the need for a unique
ID (URI) for each. Which is our only hope...and, as we've already
discussed, is required anyway by the XHTML/HTML specs...

so first, profiles...OK i finally get it now.

1.
I went and checked out the profile at:

http://gmpg.org/xfn/11

which, although an example document would be nice, does seem to conform to
a profile example on the w3c site:

http://www.w3.org/2002/12/namespace

Note that I'm *not* trying to make a point showing the namespace profile,
it's just that, frankly, there aren't a lot of profiles out there to be
found, and I wanted to find one from "the source" so I would know that it
was conformant.

So, in conclusion, *when these formats have their profiles*, they are
XHTML conformant. Which is good :-)

2. namespaces and mixing markup:

As I mentioned earlier, I still have a question regarding the point that
Scott brought up about using multiple microformats within a single
document, which, if I understand correctly, is kinda the whole point of
microformats.

I don't understand how you would mix domain-specific markup without some
kind of mechanism for informing software about which is which. Otherwise
the different vocabularies have no real meaning to a software application.
(Context is everything when you're dealing with semantics. Otherwise,
there are no semantics really :-)

Actually, Scott's example looks like it could work.

       [help controls presentation + help content references defined
 with microformats]

       [navigation panel presentation + navigation controls defined
 with microformats]

I was going to ask if the different microformats be defined using multiple
profile attributes within the same HEAD element? But that seems really
messy, and doesn't solve the problem of differentiating the markup within
the page. (I can't tell if it's allowed.)

Would using multiple profile attributes even be allowed? And how would a
user agent able to differentiate between the different microformats if
they all use "rel-tag" method?

Is there perhaps an example of using multiple vocabularies in action, so I
may practice implementing it. I'd like to get started on the video
metadata microformat examples, and I would like to incorporate another
microformat within the example to demonstrate how this would be
accomplished.

thanks!

lisa

> On Oct 4, 2005, at 2:01 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>>>
>>>> I dynamically build my XHTML documents from a mixture of content
>>>> data
>>>> and presentation data. The content markup typically gets wrapped by
>>>> layers of presentation markup. It could be that the only data I want
>>>> to publish as a microformat is the author of a single deeply
>>>> embedded
>>>> component. How do I persist the context of the microformat instance
>>>> that includes the author's name when the  presentation is now
>>>> part of
>>>> the context of that component? It is also typically the case that
>>>> the
>>>> presentation markup outweighs the sematic content market by 100
>>>> to 1.
>>>> And the presentation is simply a snapshot that could change for
>>>> whatever reason invalidating the persisted context that was
>>>> presented
>>>> to the user.
>>>
>>> I don't follow you here. A concrete example would be more useful.
>>
>> A content provider may want to add many instances of microformats
>> within a single XHTML document. There could be multiple instances of a
>> particular type of microformat in this document and some microformat
>> instances could be related to each other in some way. Say I want to
>> create a tool that understands the content in XHTML documents that
>> support microformats. As I see it, the only information I have
>> available for understanding the meaning of one of these microformat
>> instances is its "xhtml context"; where in the document the data
>> resides. This context could be interpreted by starting at the
>> microformat element and walking up its parent elements capturing their
>> name, class, and other attributes along the way.
>
> Um, this is still theoretical, not concrete. But let me try to answer
> anyway..
>
> Sure, "microformat instances" can relate to each other- they can be
> included within each other and be linked to by each other. Context
> may be important in some applications, but the context information
> necessary for each application will be different, and therefore
> determined by that particular application.
>
>> In a world where every XHTML document is semantically legible this
>> would not be a problem. This is not the world we live in and it will
>> not soon change, if ever. So here I am with this "xhtml context" that
>> includes a lot of pretty useless information that could change for
>> reasons that have nothing to do with how a human would use contextual
>> information to logically interpret the meaning of a particular
>> microformat instance. I want
>> content providers and designers to be able to establish a "semantic
>> context" for a microformat instance that is independant of but related
>> to the actual "xhtml context" of the microformat instance.
>>
>> You wanted an example. Say I defined a "semantic context" to be a
>> microformat implemented as a span element with class="context"...
>>
>> 
>>    
>>       [help controls presentation + help content references defined
>> with microformats]
>>    
>>    
>>       [navigation panel presentation + navigation controls defined
>> with microformats]
>>    
>>    
>>       
>>          
>>             [tool bar presentation + tools defined with microformats]
>>          
>>          
>>             
>>                
>>                      [microformats about author of content-0]
>>                   
>>                
>>             
>>             
>>                
>>                      [microformats about author of content-1]
>>                   
>>                
>>             
>>          
>>       
>>       
>>          [presentation provided by adivertising service + ads defined
>> with microformat spam]
>>       
>>    
>> 
>>
>>  can be seen as a default semantic context. I suppose so could
>> . Semantic contexts would not be needed for simple documents
>> containing only one microformat instance or one list of microformats.
>> I am trying to throw something out there that is as simple as possible
>> to demonstrate a point. I suppose that XOXO lists could be made to
>> serve as semantic contexts but the point is that the logical
>> (semantic) context stays intact despite changes to the physical
>> (xhtml) context.
>
> Whoa. What do we need these contexts for? Which microformats need to
> be enclosed in a specific context?
>
>> The above example attempts to demonstrate the establishment of the
>> following semantic contexts. I am going to stipulate that to get this
>> to cleanly work I will need a requirement that all microformat
>> instances support a unique id.
>
> Good practice, but will not be required.
>
>> However, this may not be necessary to
>> still obtain benefits from this suggested enhancement. That said, if
>> there were a unique id requirement I could provide my users support
>> for subscribing to a semantic context via an Atom feed and they could
>> monitor individual microformat instances migrating from one semantic
>> context to another within the same XHTML document. Anyway, here is
>> that list of contexts...
>>
>> /body/
>> /body/help/
>> /body/navigation/
>> /body/navigation/history (represents an example path to history
>> control, a microformat instance)
>> /body/workspace/
>> /body/workspace/tools/
>> /body/workspace/content/
>> /body/workspace/content/0
>> /body/workspace/content/1
>> /body/ads
>>
>> BTW, when I was thinking about this solution the topic of
>> accessibility kept coming up.
>>
>>
>>>> Microformats would be more useful to me if they each had a standard
>>>> xml schema,
>>>>
>>>
>>> They do, XHTML.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I still need to personally teach my software to understand each and
>> every new microformat that I want to support. It would be better if
>> the software could read a schema that captured the semantics of a
>> microformat and thus teach itself the meaning of new formats as they
>> appear.
>>
>>
>>>> if microformat instances required a unique id in the
>>>> context of its document,
>>>>
>>>
>>> profile uri's (I know, I know, not all microformats have profile URIs
>>> yet, but they should and will)
>>>
>>
>> This would provide tools that consume microformats an indicator as to
>> what type of microformat they were dealing with and perhaps an
>> opportunity for a hosted schema but that is not what I mean by unique
>> id. This would be used to track a microformat instance within an XHTML
>> document. It could also be used as a globally unique identifer when
>> combined with the URL of its document.
>
> Of course. Nothing new here, I suggest you read the archives on this
> one.
>
>>>> to an XHTML element instead
>>>> of serving double duty as XHTML presentation elements. This would
>>>> let
>>>> me cleanly repurpose and route microformats around my system without
>>>> having to go to the trouble of teaching th
>>>
>>>
>>> argg. My message got cut off here and the mail's not in the archive
>>> yet. I have a feeling that you were about to say "...trouble of
>>> teaching designers about semantic markup." If that's the case, then I
>>> would respond by saying that we actually have rather eager adoption
>>> among web designers (assuming they're already relatively
>>> progressive).
>>
>> Nope, the last sentance was...
>>
>>
>>> This would let me cleanly repurpose and route microformats around my
>>> system without having to go to the trouble of teaching the system to
>>> understand what they are.
>>
>> I don't see teaching designers to produce microformats being a
>> bottleneck to your solution. I see the bottleneck being the difficulty
>> in teaching software to consume and make sense of microformats. It is
>> my hope that sematic contexts could help with this bottleneck while
>> also enabling new applications for microformats.
>
>
> I really don't know what you're tyring to get at here, Scott (and I
> don't think I'm the only one not getting it).
>
> I admit, there's a lot to learn with microformats, some of which may
> seem like "koolaid" that must be taken on faith, but trust me, we
> thought a lot of things through and if you question them we're like
> to have thought-out answers.
>
> Whatever it is you're trying to accomplish here, it seems very
> boiling-the-ocean-ish; you still haven't described a concrete usage
> scenario, without which we can't really talk about solutions.
>
> -ryan
>
> --
> Ryan King
> ryan@technorati.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>

Lisa Rein
http://onlisareinsradar.com
http://www.widehive.com
http://www.lisarein.com

From drernie at opendarwin.org  Tue Oct  4 15:53:47 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:53:56 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<5BB097E6-798A-4B1F-BFF9-BF235CCF4DEA@technorati.com>

	<20118B92-3AFC-4B11-97EA-DD5F485B5E12@technorati.com>

	<88C2648C-F0D7-4F9F-8219-5BBB478882D6@technorati.com>

	<2F88707B-F453-4B0B-8470-12081686BCA1@opendarwin.org>

Message-ID: <856B4F8C-FD3D-450D-9E6C-F2393C673BAC@opendarwin.org>

Hi Scott,

On Oct 4, 2005, at 3:30 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> It is true that I don't understand the zen of microformats. I am
> simply applying my experience as to how interface designers and
> content providers would want to adopt this technology in attempt to
> understand what type of tools they might need.

Yeah, I get the feeling you work with a very different community of  
people than most of us on this list.   The sort of questions we ask are:

* How can I represent the structured data on my computer (addresse  
book, calendar entries, outlines, presentations) as a web page, that:
	a) can be styled using CSS
	b) allows the semantic structure to be easily extracted
	c) makes best use of existing XHTML conventions

I suspect that may be part of the disconnect: we are primarily  
focused on *personal* data, not *enterprise* data.

If you could care less about address book vCards, but want instead to  
represent more abstract or generic datatypes, then microformats (at  
least in its current incarnation) probably isn't for you.

Best,
-- Ernie P.

------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Tue Oct  4 15:58:29 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Tue Oct  4 15:58:34 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510041558s55e1daa1h1e5e3984fed4b7bb@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> On Oct 4, 2005, at 2:01 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> > On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> >> On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:

> > A content provider may want to add many instances of microformats
> > within a single XHTML document. There could be multiple instances of a
> > particular type of microformat in this document and some microformat
> > instances could be related to each other in some way. Say I want to
> > create a tool that understands the content in XHTML documents that
> > support microformats. As I see it, the only information I have
> > available for understanding the meaning of one of these microformat
> > instances is its "xhtml context"; where in the document the data
> > resides. This context could be interpreted by starting at the
> > microformat element and walking up its parent elements capturing their
> > name, class, and other attributes along the way.
>
> Um, this is still theoretical, not concrete. But let me try to answer
> anyway..
>
> Sure, "microformat instances" can relate to each other- they can be
> included within each other and be linked to by each other. Context
> may be important in some applications, but the context information
> necessary for each application will be different, and therefore
> determined by that particular application.

I think Scott's points are valid - it's easy enough to see how simple
examples of microformat data in documents can be interpreted, but what
happens when there's lots of interwoven data in a document 
(potentially from different microformats)? I don't think faith is much
help. The context information necessary for each application *may* be
different, but much of the idea behind standards is, well to
standardize, enable the sharing of information and hence enable
communication. Where any particular format draws the line between
shared language and per-app interpretation - that would be an
ecumenical matter.

As far as I can tell, and as Ryan's statement suggests, above a
certain level of complexity (as specified in the domain models),
basically microformats are stuffed. The interpretation (and any
context) does have to be decided at the application level, and clients
and servers will have to agree on that interpretation, rather than any
more generally shared data language. This is a weakness in
microformats as a general solution to conveying data in markup.

But I believe it's a fundamental mistake to view them as a general
solution to data transport in any case. There's a particular range of
tasks for which they are optimal on today's Web compared to other
formats. Another useful tool in the kit, no more no less.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From kmarks at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 16:05:57 2005
From: kmarks at technorati.com (Kevin Marks)
Date: Tue Oct  4 16:06:10 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
Message-ID: 

On Oct 4, 2005, at 3:40 PM, Lisa Rein wrote:
> But first things first. RE: profiles. Then I will get back to  
> namespaces
> and/or Scott's elegant attempt at providing context for the different
> namespaces using span tags, etc. And demonstrating the need for a  
> unique
> ID (URI) for each. Which is our only hope...and, as we've already
> discussed, is required anyway by the XHTML/HTML specs...
[...]
> I don't understand how you would mix domain-specific markup without  
> some
> kind of mechanism for informing software about which is which.  
> Otherwise
> the different vocabularies have no real meaning to a software  
> application.
> (Context is everything when you're dealing with semantics. Otherwise,
> there are no semantics really :-)

I think I see where the misunderstanding is coming from here. We  
distinguish (not always clearly) between elemental microformats (such  
as rel="tag" or votelinks) and compound ones, such as hCard or hReview  
which can combine many elemental ones.

For rel="tag", the context is deliberately left vague, so it can be  
redefined by a containing microformat.

The Compound ones work by having a class name in the outer container  
defining the context, which is indeed like Scott's example.

here's where I explained it earlier:

http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/07/25/ 
understanding_true_decentralisation_the_microformat_model.php

and the example:

 0.2  Wonderful seafood,  
workmanlike ambience 
  Jul 22, 2005  by Kevin Marks business  Phil's Fish  
Market  7600 Sandholdt  
Rd. 
 Moss Landing, CA 95039   
831-633-2152

  ★★★★★ Phil's is  
tucked away in between the docks and the beach in Moss  
Landing, where it gets first pick of the fish landed  
there each day, and cooks up delicious fresh seafood dishes  
that would cost 3 times as much in SF. Resolutely unostentatious, you  
order food by lining up at the cash register, and while you can sit outside, the  
seats face the power station opposite the front, rather than the beach  
at the back.

The outer div with class "hreview" provides context for the tags.  
Technorati and other comprehensive blog indexers will pick up the  
'seafood','fish', 'outside' and 'Moss Landing' tags from that and  
associate them with this post, but a specialised service looking for  
reviews could see them in the context of the 'hreview' class, and use  
the more structured rating data to make more sense of it.

So the namespace issue collapses into choosing suitable unique names  
for these outer classes.
>
> I was going to ask if the different microformats be defined using  
> multiple
> profile attributes within the same HEAD element? But that seems really
> messy, and doesn't solve the problem of differentiating the markup  
> within
> the page. (I can't tell if it's allowed.)

As noted on the XMDP page, you can have multiple profiles listed in a  
single profile header.

> Would using multiple profile attributes even be allowed? And how would  
> a
> user agent able to differentiate between the different microformats if
> they all use "rel-tag" method?

Yes, by the containing context, as above.

From ryan at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 16:15:52 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Tue Oct  4 16:15:55 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510041558s55e1daa1h1e5e3984fed4b7bb@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510041558s55e1daa1h1e5e3984fed4b7bb@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <304B6A69-31CF-43AF-B826-2D41ED338ED5@technorati.com>

On Oct 4, 2005, at 3:58 PM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> On 10/5/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>> On Oct 4, 2005, at 2:01 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>>> On 10/3/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>>>> On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
>>> A content provider may want to add many instances of microformats
>>> within a single XHTML document. There could be multiple instances  
>>> of a
>>> particular type of microformat in this document and some microformat
>>> instances could be related to each other in some way. Say I want to
>>> create a tool that understands the content in XHTML documents that
>>> support microformats. As I see it, the only information I have
>>> available for understanding the meaning of one of these microformat
>>> instances is its "xhtml context"; where in the document the data
>>> resides. This context could be interpreted by starting at the
>>> microformat element and walking up its parent elements capturing  
>>> their
>>> name, class, and other attributes along the way.
>>
>> Um, this is still theoretical, not concrete. But let me try to answer
>> anyway..
>>
>> Sure, "microformat instances" can relate to each other- they can be
>> included within each other and be linked to by each other. Context
>> may be important in some applications, but the context information
>> necessary for each application will be different, and therefore
>> determined by that particular application.
>
> I think Scott's points are valid - it's easy enough to see how simple
> examples of microformat data in documents can be interpreted, but what
> happens when there's lots of interwoven data in a document
> (potentially from different microformats)?

Its tough to talk in the theoretical here? we can't design solutions  
for situation which may or may not occur sometime in the future.

> I don't think faith is much help.

Neither do I.

> The context information necessary for each application *may* be
> different, but much of the idea behind standards is, well to
> standardize, enable the sharing of information and hence enable
> communication. Where any particular format draws the line between
> shared language and per-app interpretation - that would be an
> ecumenical matter.

I've still not seen an example of a microformat which needs to have  
explicit context outside of itself.

And, sure, Danny, if/when there comes a time for standardizing this,  
we can- but there's nothing to standardize yet.

> As far as I can tell, and as Ryan's statement suggests, above a
> certain level of complexity (as specified in the domain models),
> basically microformats are stuffed. The interpretation (and any
> context) does have to be decided at the application level, and clients
> and servers will have to agree on that interpretation, rather than any
> more generally shared data language. This is a weakness in
> microformats as a general solution to conveying data in markup.

I think Kevin's response covers this area well.

> But I believe it's a fundamental mistake to view them as a general
> solution to data transport in any case.

No one's arguing that micformats are general solutions, but, rather,  
a series of specific solutions.

We purposely target the 80/20 (or 90/10) ratio.

> There's a particular range of
> tasks for which they are optimal on today's Web compared to other
> formats. Another useful tool in the kit, no more no less.

As are all tools.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Tue Oct  4 16:27:20 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Tue Oct  4 16:27:24 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
Message-ID: <5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>

On Oct 4, 2005, at 3:40 PM, Lisa Rein wrote:

> I understand *exactly* what Scott's getting at here. It's quite
> fundamental, really. I think he did a great job at taking a stab at  
> fixing
> the problem that I was just about to send an email out on, so here  
> goes.
>
> But first things first. RE: profiles. Then I will get back to  
> namespaces
> and/or Scott's elegant attempt at providing context for the different
> namespaces using span tags, etc. And demonstrating the need for a  
> unique
> ID (URI) for each. Which is our only hope...and, as we've already
> discussed, is required anyway by the XHTML/HTML specs...
>
> so first, profiles...OK i finally get it now.
>
> 1. I went and checked out the profile at:
>
> http://gmpg.org/xfn/11
>
> which, although an example document would be nice, does seem to  
> conform to
> a profile example on the w3c site:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2002/12/namespace
>
> Note that I'm *not* trying to make a point showing the namespace  
> profile,
> it's just that, frankly, there aren't a lot of profiles out there  
> to be
> found, and I wanted to find one from "the source" so I would know  
> that it
> was conformant.
>
> So, in conclusion, *when these formats have their profiles*, they are
> XHTML conformant. Which is good :-)
>
> 2. namespaces and mixing markup:
>
> As I mentioned earlier, I still have a question regarding the point  
> that
> Scott brought up about using multiple microformats within a single
> document, which, if I understand correctly, is kinda the whole  
> point of
> microformats.
>
> I don't understand how you would mix domain-specific markup without  
> some
> kind of mechanism for informing software about which is which.

Its quite easy, we do it everyday.

You see, agents should look for microformats they understand and  
ignore other markup. This is the case with current XFN  
implementations, X2V, etc.

> Otherwise
> the different vocabularies have no real meaning to a software  
> application.

The microformat still has meaning.

> (Context is everything when you're dealing with semantics. Otherwise,
> there are no semantics really :-)

Context is important, but it can be local, we don't need global  
context to make sense of every bit of data.

> Actually, Scott's example looks like it could work.

For what? I still don't know what (specific) problem that (real, not  
imaginary) people are facing *today*.

>     
>        [help controls presentation + help content references defined
>  with microformats]
>     
>     
>        [navigation panel presentation + navigation controls defined
>  with microformats]
>     
>
> I was going to ask if the different microformats be defined using  
> multiple
> profile attributes within the same HEAD element? But that seems really
> messy, and doesn't solve the problem of differentiating the markup  
> within
> the page. (I can't tell if it's allowed.)

Multiple profiles are allowed, space separated.

Multiple microformats *are* distinguishable. See Kevin's recent post  
on re: elemental and compound formats.

> Would using multiple profile attributes even be allowed? And how  
> would a
> user agent able to differentiate between the different microformats if
> they all use "rel-tag" method?

They are differentiable because they are *different*. I'm not sure  
what more we need.

> Is there perhaps an example of using multiple vocabularies in  
> action, so I
> may practice implementing it. I'd like to get started on the video
> metadata microformat examples, and I would like to incorporate another
> microformat within the example to demonstrate how this would be
> accomplished.

Um, Tantek uses rel-tag, hcalendar and hcard on his blog -> http:// 
tantek.com/log/

Eventful uses hcalendar and hcard -> http://eventful.com, as does  
upcoming.org

Come to think of it, most of http://microformats.org/wiki/ 
implementations uses multiple microformats.

Once again, as Rohit says, we've *proven* that microformats (at  
least, the ones developed so far) work in practice, we just need to  
show that they work in *theory*.

The arguments in this thread are theoretical? in theory there's no  
difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 02:53:47 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Wed Oct  5 02:53:51 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
References: 

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Ryan King  wrote:

> Once again, as Rohit says, we've *proven* that microformats (at
> least, the ones developed so far) work in practice, we just need to
> show that they work in *theory*.
>
> The arguments in this thread are theoretical? in theory there's no
> difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

I've observed development around other knowledge representation
techniques, and in that space theoretical questions can very quickly
become practical problems. When XHTML is expressing explicit data
rather than being document markup, it's squarely in that territory.
We're not in Web 1.0 any more, Toto ;-)

So although the slogans may be helpful for adoption, I'd suggest
caution in assuming that things will work in the general case,
whatever success there has been with specific cases.

Having said that, working code is an extremely good starting point,
and personally I have no doubt that microformats have great potential.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Wed Oct  5 04:42:35 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr.Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Wed Oct  5 04:42:59 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
References: 

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

Hi Danny,

On Oct 5, 2005, at 2:53 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> So although the slogans may be helpful for adoption, I'd suggest
> caution in assuming that things will work in the general case,
> whatever success there has been with specific cases.

A very valid point.  However, I'm not sure we really understand the  
"general case" well enough to even answer that question.

After all, in a certain sense URLs don't work in the "general case"  
-- but that's why they actually work in real life.

 From my perspective, the real lesson is to always be aware of second- 
order legacy effects, and keep track of your boundary assumptions.   
That seems the best we can humanly do without, as they say, "trying  
to boil the ocean." :-)

------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From luke.arno at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 07:01:07 2005
From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno)
Date: Wed Oct  5 07:01:10 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>
References: 

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>
Message-ID: 

On 10/5/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> Hi Danny,
>
> On Oct 5, 2005, at 2:53 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> > So although the slogans may be helpful for adoption, I'd suggest
> > caution in assuming that things will work in the general case,
> > whatever success there has been with specific cases.
>
> A very valid point.  However, I'm not sure we really understand the
> "general case" well enough to even answer that question.
>
> After all, in a certain sense URLs don't work in the "general case"
> -- but that's why they actually work in real life.
>
>  From my perspective, the real lesson is to always be aware of second-
> order legacy effects, and keep track of your boundary assumptions.
> That seems the best we can humanly do without, as they say, "trying
> to boil the ocean." :-)
>

Absolutely.

We should eschew the "general case." Solve specific problems and allow
solutions to converge naturally into something more - then standardize.
Evolution is messy but it is smarter than our smartest plans.

- Luke
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 07:46:45 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Wed Oct  5 07:46:48 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 

	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

Message-ID: <14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Luke Arno  wrote:
> We should eschew the "general case."

At the risk of letting this thread live on forever, I think this sums
up the fundamental disconnect here.  The regulars on this list grok
this intuitively, or at least have accepted it for so long that
they've forgotten how to articulate it.  We simply don't care about
the general case.

Some people (Scott, Lisa, others) look at this and say "what about
this edge case?" or "how do you combine them?" or "I need something
with rigid structure" or "how do you validate them" or whatever.  And
these are all obvious questions that form interesting permathreads on
mailing lists around the world.  And we just don't care.  Not because
we're lazy or sloppy or naive -- in fact, just the opposite.  Our
apathy towards the edge case is born out of bitter experience.  We all
bear the scars of drawn-out battles over edge cases that satisfied
someone's sense of "completeness" or "aesthetics" or "perfection", but
ultimately made the common cases harder and solved no real problem.

Ryan said microformats are all about 80/20.  He's right, but unless
you've share our common experience, he may as well be speaking in Zen
koans.  Most standards go like this:

1. Solve 80% of the problem in a matter of weeks.
2. Spend two years arguing about the last 20%.  (*cough* Atom *cough*)
3. Implement the 80% in a matter of weeks.  Wonder why everything is so hard.
4. Spend months implementing the last 20%.  Realize why the first 80%
was so hard.  Curse a lot.
5. Discover that the last 20% wasn't really worth all the time spent
arguing about it or implementing it.

Microformats, on the other hand, go like this:

1. Solve the 80% in a matter of weeks.
2. Promise (wink wink) to tackle the 20% "later".
3. Implement the 80% in a matter of days.
4. Watch people use it for a few months.  Maybe tweak a little here and there.
5. Discover that the last 20% wasn't really necessary after all. 
Breathe a sigh of relief that you never bothered.  Move on to the next
problem.

The regulars on this list have all been through the full standards
cycle many times.  We know about edge cases, we know about validators,
we know about standards.  We know.  We've been there.  We've all
decided that this way is better.  Not because it's easier or faster or
sloppier, but because *it leads to a better result*.  Really.  The
fact that it happens to be easier and faster is just a karmic
coincidence.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From sayrer at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 08:32:14 2005
From: sayrer at gmail.com (Robert Sayre)
Date: Wed Oct  5 08:32:18 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:
> We've all
> decided that this way is better.  Not because it's easier or faster or
> sloppier, but because *it leads to a better result*.  Really.

That message is an interesting comment on "standards", and I agree
with most of it. However, many standards organizations *start* by
positioning themselves as a venue for Getting Things Done as opposed
to the Evil Corporate Inefficient Bureaucratic Organization that
precedes it. One day, microformats.org will be the ECIBO if it's at
all successful.

Mark asserts that microformats lead to better results, but that leaves
Scott's original (good) question unanswered.

Scott Anderson wrote:
> What is your criteria for determining when you have made microformats a success?

Adoption seems to be /okay/, but I'm still kind of pondering what
these thing are for and what kind of apps use them. I would check the
wiki, but it seems to be down, so I wonder if  there's an answer to
the most frequently asked question around here:

"What are microformats for?"

Robert Sayre
From manuel.gonzalez.noriega at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 09:05:52 2005
From: manuel.gonzalez.noriega at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Manuel_Gonz=E1lez_Noriega?=)
Date: Wed Oct  5 09:05:55 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] XOXO use case
Message-ID: 

Hi all,

I'd like to introduce myself to the group. My name is Manuel, I'm from
Spain. [?C?mo van tus estudios de espa?ol Mark? ;) ]

Regarding the very interesting thread regarding microformats
usefulness, I'd like to present you with the use I intend to make of
one of them (XOXO) and the benefit I'm expecting to gain therefore.
I'd like to be corrected if any of my assumptions are wrong.

* I'm writing, as a side project, a run-of-the-mill Web 2.0 project,
complete with white background, lime green 18px Arial headings and
every other Flickr inherited clich? I can think of. (1)

* Most of the screens will be listings consisting of items composed by
several well known players : "The Title", "The Excerpt", "The
[Optional] Thumbnail", "The Source"  For "The Excerpt" and "The Date"

* I want to mark up the listings as XOXO lists. What for? Well,
because I trust the strictness of the format to automagically convert
the plain 'pages' in a easily retrievable list of items, for external
parties to grab, transform and remix if necessary.  I expect XOXO to
help the listing progress from mere 'page' to 'data source'.

Mostly, I see microformats as 'inexpensive APIs' to complement other
building blocks such as syndication feeds, formal REST APIs, RDF/SQL
dumps, etc in the struggle to share as much data as possible and make
it easy discoverable.

Please, enlighten me if I'm way off-track and thanks for your great
contributions to the evolution of the web :-)

(1) Not every clich?. Just most.

--
Manuel
a veces :) a veces :(
pero siempre trabajando duro para Simplel?gica: apariencia,
experiencia y comunicaci?n en la web.
http://simplelogica.net # (+34) 985 22 12 65

?Ah! y escribiendo en Logicola: http://logicola.simplelogica.net
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Wed Oct  5 09:59:31 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr.Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Wed Oct  5 09:59:52 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

Hi Robert,

On Oct 5, 2005, at 8:32 AM, Robert Sayre wrote:
>  I wonder if  there's an answer to the most frequently asked  
> question around here:
>
> "What are microformats for?"

The answer is that there is no answer.   Is that Zen enough for you? :-)

Seriously, it does seem that either people immediately sense the  
value, or it appears completely ridiculous to them.

In my case, microformats were clearly the answer to several questions  
I've had:
* What is the most robust and reusable to way to CSS-tag my HTML
* What is the easiest way to define a new content format that I want  
to see widely adopted
* How can I publish stuff on the web that I also want people to pull  
*off* the web

That is why I decided to drink the kool-aid and start doing  
everything in microformats: because its easy, because it reduces my  
need for making arbitrary decisions, and because it makes it easy to  
recover the data later.

However, it is almost like asking the question "What is a car for?"    
There's no generic answer that both covers all the edge cases, and  
yet still differentiates it from bikes, buses, or bovines.

Unlike many standards organizations, I don't see microformats.org  
trying to convince people that "This *will* solve your problem."    
Rather, we're saying, "This has solved -our- problems.  Why not look  
to see if it might solve yours?" That's all.

-- Ernie P.
------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From sayrer at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 10:20:42 2005
From: sayrer at gmail.com (Robert Sayre)
Date: Wed Oct  5 10:20:46 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <68fba5c50510051020w6badab57u469f195c4e425da8@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> Seriously, it does seem that either people immediately sense the
> value, or it appears completely ridiculous to them.

I don't like the binary opposition. I don't feel like I "get it", but
I have used XOXO to good effect already. I think I understand why it's
better than some random XML format.

> Rather, we're saying, "This has solved -our- problems.  Why not look
> to see if it might solve yours?" That's all.

Yes, you guys keep saying that, and I am prepared to believe it. So,
what were the problems and how did the microformats solve it? I can
understand the reluctance to answer that question directly, since it
opens to door to all sorts of "but what about..." kinds of objections
that fall outside the sweet spot.

Robert Sayre
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 11:02:16 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Wed Oct  5 11:02:19 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:

> The regulars on this list have all been through the full standards
> cycle many times.  We know about edge cases, we know about validators,
> we know about standards.  We know.  We've been there.  We've all
> decided that this way is better.  Not because it's easier or faster or
> sloppier, but because *it leads to a better result*.  Really.  The
> fact that it happens to be easier and faster is just a karmic
> coincidence.

If it leads to a better result, great. But I haven't seen any
compelling evidence for that yet. Yep, it works so far, but then so
does Atom, which followed a more traditional route.

One thing I do find a little curious. A large proportion of systems on
the Web have a long tail distribution - there's value in the
thousands, millions of little thingies, not only the top 10. So I'm a
little surprised to find so many people around these parts prepared to
write off edge cases as so much cruft. As the Web grows, surely the
sum of specific cases approaches the general case..?

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Wed Oct  5 11:28:27 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr.Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Wed Oct  5 11:28:41 2005
Subject: Case Studies Re: [microformats-discuss] Re: Education
In-Reply-To: <68fba5c50510051020w6badab57u469f195c4e425da8@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>

	<68fba5c50510051020w6badab57u469f195c4e425da8@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <30318D04-AC3F-41F9-A36E-1936AE92124E@opendarwin.org>

Hi Robert,

> So, what were the problems and how did the microformats solve it?

Hmm, I feel like there's a disconnect. I feel like I've been giving  
you answers, but perhaps they are either too general or too specific  
to actually help.  Let me give you a couple case studies; if that  
doesn't work for you, perhaps you can help me understand why:

1.  Organization web page

I'm responsible for the website or an informal group at work. The  
HTML I inherited was a horrible mess, and painful to maintain.  I  
realized that it was pretty much just a list of events, people, and  
resources.   So, just to avoid having to think about HTML design, I  
turned the whole thing into a bunch of XOXO, hCards, and hEvents.    
Then, in order to make it look the way I wanted, I just added (or  
often, stole:) appropriate style declarations.

Could I have done this without microformats? Actually, no.  You  
might, but *I* couldn't.  Microformat was the crutch to help me think  
intelligently about CSS.  As a bonus, I can now use all these funky  
tools to extract vCards -- and show the entire site as a  
presentation. Cool!

2.  Custom application format

One of my side projects is working on a program to display lyrics for  
sing-a-longs (i.e., church worship services).   I was experimenting  
with a bunch of different XML schemas, but a) I wasn't sure I had it  
right, and b) there was no way I could imagine getting a lot of  
people to adopt it.

Then I discovered S5.  I suddenly realized that XOXO was the perfect  
format for encoding lyrics (stanzas, lines, etc.).
| It is so obviously *right* that it is trivial to evangelize, rather  
than arguing over every last tag.   It is flexible, so people can add  
their own metadata if needed, and socialize them informally rather  
than having to push them through a central standard (which I'd have  
to maintain, ugh). It is also non-intimidating, so people who know  
HTML but not XML (believe me, there's a lot of them) are comfortable  
adopting it.

Not bad.  But wait, there's more!  This also means:
	a) There's a trivial way to view every file (browser), even without  
my app
	b) Design can be done using CSS, meanings trivial to customize -- i  
don't need to provide a tool
	c) I can reuse the existing HTML viewing tools on my platform

At this point, I literally cannot imagine tackling any web site or  
application format problem withOUT leveraging existing  
microformats.   It is the shortest route to success for the kinds of  
things *I* care about.  Where getting an 80% solution out - now- is  
the most important thing.  To Danny's point:

On Oct 5, 2005, at 11:02 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> One thing I do find a little curious. A large proportion of systems on
> the Web have a long tail distribution - there's value in the
> thousands, millions of little thingies, not only the top 10. So I'm a
> little surprised to find so many people around these parts prepared to
> write off edge cases as so much cruft. As the Web grows, surely the
> sum of specific cases approaches the general case..?

Not in my experience.  If you slice the 80/20 correctly, it is  
actually only the top 5% of customers who ever actually run into the  
tough edge cases.  The long tail rarely cares -- certainly not enough  
to pay the added cost.

Its kinda like optimizing source code.  Its better to write it first  
then optimize the hotspots, than try to pre-optimized what you  
*think* the problems will be.

Hope this helps,

- Ernie P.

On Oct 5, 2005, at 10:20 AM, Robert Sayre wrote:

> On 10/5/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
>> Seriously, it does seem that either people immediately sense the
>> value, or it appears completely ridiculous to them.
>
> I don't like the binary opposition. I don't feel like I "get it", but
> I have used XOXO to good effect already. I think I understand why it's
> better than some random XML format.
>
>> Rather, we're saying, "This has solved -our- problems.  Why not look
>> to see if it might solve yours?" That's all.
>
> Yes, you guys keep saying that, and I am prepared to believe it. So,
> what were the problems and how did the microformats solve it? I can
> understand the reluctance to answer that question directly, since it
> opens to door to all sorts of "but what about..." kinds of objections
> that fall outside the sweet spot.
>
> Robert Sayre

------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From stephen at downes.ca  Wed Oct  5 11:30:52 2005
From: stephen at downes.ca (Stephen Downes)
Date: Wed Oct  5 11:31:03 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educating Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43441BDC.5070803@downes.ca>

Hiya,

>On 10/5/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:
>
>>The regulars on this list have all been through the full standards
>>cycle many times.  We know about edge cases, we know about validators,
>>we know about standards.  We know.  We've been there.  We've all
>>decided that this way is better.  Not because it's easier or faster or
>>sloppier, but because *it leads to a better result*.  Really.  The
>>fact that it happens to be easier and faster is just a karmic
>>coincidence.
>>    
>>
This is my observation as well, based on my experience in academic 
publication and learning resources metadata.

In these fields, two major standards exist: Dublin Core, which will be 
familiar to many of you, and Learning Object Metadata (IEEE 1484), which 
will not. As you may know, Dublin Core began as a very simple 
specification, and for the most part remains so, though the 
supplementary DC-Terms was later added. By contrast, IEEE-LOM, which 
began life as a consortium backed a priori specification (IMS LOM), 
started and continues to be a complex specification.

While it is true that IEEE-LOM is well-used, particularly via an 
application profile called SCORM (implemented for the U.S. military), it 
is primarily used by large corporations. And studies of its use (cf 
Friesen 2004, via http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000567.html ) show 
that practitioners only use a small number of core data elements; other 
elements are either not used or misused. Dublin Core, meanwhile, has 
become a staple for the Open Archives Initiative and is now used to 
describe millions of academic papers worldwide.

Danny Ayers wrote:

>If it leads to a better result, great. But I haven't seen any
>compelling evidence for that yet. Yep, it works so far, but then so
>does Atom, which followed a more traditional route.
>  
>
Atom had the advantage of following RSS and is in many ways a clone of 
RSS (and in many ways is not). Without venturing to start a religious 
war, I would nonetheless say that whether Atom 'works' is still open to 
debate. I would ask, is the functionality that Atom provides over and 
above RSS widely used in a non-corporate environment (ie., outside the 
major blogging engines)?

>One thing I do find a little curious. A large proportion of systems on
>the Web have a long tail distribution - there's value in the
>thousands, millions of little thingies, not only the top 10. So I'm a
>little surprised to find so many people around these parts prepared to
>write off edge cases as so much cruft. As the Web grows, surely the
>sum of specific cases approaches the general case..?
>  
>
This is why the core specification should remain extensible, not why the 
little-used features should be included in the specification.

While the little-used features, cumulatively, add up to be as important 
as a core feature, the little-used features have the disadvantage of 
being all *different* from each other. You can't take a hundred 
little-used features and craft one 'general' version of them all.

Microformats should stay simple. Each microformat should aspire to no 
greater complexity than Dublin Core or RSS. And the number of 'core' 
microformats should remain low. Define just enough to demonstrate the 
utility of the format, and document and clarify extensions (including 
additional microformats) as they become more widely used. Don't try to 
do it all up front. Once the 80 percent line is felt to have been 
attained, call a moratorium to standards development and begin 
developing applications and documentation. There can always be a phase two.

-- Stephen

p.s. I can't take it any more -- I've corrected the spelling of 
'Educating' in the subject line.  ;)

-- 
Stephen Downes  ~  Research Officer  ~  National Research Council Canada
http://www.downes.ca  ~  stephen@downes.ca         __\|/__ Free Learning

From dougal at gunters.org  Wed Oct  5 11:31:07 2005
From: dougal at gunters.org (Dougal Campbell)
Date: Wed Oct  5 11:31:26 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educating Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43441BEB.4000107@gunters.org>

Danny Ayers wrote:

> One thing I do find a little curious. A large proportion of systems on
> the Web have a long tail distribution - there's value in the
> thousands, millions of little thingies, not only the top 10. So I'm a
> little surprised to find so many people around these parts prepared to
> write off edge cases as so much cruft. As the Web grows, surely the
> sum of specific cases approaches the general case..?

There's almost never going to be a "perfect" format that makes everybody 
happy. Let the edge cases fight for supremacy amongst themselves. I 
think that many edge cases will be able to "self-repair", because those 
who fall on the edge can either find some way to extend an existing 
format, or come up with a new one that's to their liking.

That's what microformats are doing in a broader sense. We're extending 
[x]html by overloading class, rel, etc. to provide additional semantics. 
Of course, many people have been doing that for a long time anyways 
(unwittingly?). We're just organizing some of the more useful extensions 
in a slightly more formalized way, right?

-- 
Dougal Campbell 
http://dougal.gunters.org/

From sayrer at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 11:56:05 2005
From: sayrer at gmail.com (Robert Sayre)
Date: Wed Oct  5 11:56:08 2005
Subject: Case Studies Re: [microformats-discuss] Re: Education
In-Reply-To: <30318D04-AC3F-41F9-A36E-1936AE92124E@opendarwin.org>
References: 
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>

	<68fba5c50510051020w6badab57u469f195c4e425da8@mail.gmail.com>
	<30318D04-AC3F-41F9-A36E-1936AE92124E@opendarwin.org>
Message-ID: <68fba5c50510051156x6d66bec7o5b2d13559c9b41b9@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Dr.Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> I'm responsible for the website or an informal group at work. The
> HTML I inherited was a horrible mess, and painful to maintain.  I
> realized that it was pretty much just a list of events, people, and
> resources.   So, just to avoid having to think about HTML design, I
> turned the whole thing into a bunch of XOXO, hCards, and hEvents.
> Then, in order to make it look the way I wanted, I just added (or
> often, stole:) appropriate style declarations.

Ernie. Thank you. Grounding this with a concrete case has helped me, a
lot. It may seem obvious to people who have "drunk the koolaid", but I
didn't get it at all from the microformats literature on the site
(I've read quite a bit of it). I think too much of the text is focused
on how bad other approaches are.

Robert Sayre
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 12:06:08 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Wed Oct  5 12:06:11 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
References: 

	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Danny Ayers  wrote:
> On 10/5/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:
> One thing I do find a little curious. A large proportion of systems on
> the Web have a long tail distribution - there's value in the
> thousands, millions of little thingies, not only the top 10. So I'm a
> little surprised to find so many people around these parts prepared to
> write off edge cases as so much cruft. As the Web grows, surely the
> sum of specific cases approaches the general case..?

This reminds me of the classic quote from the economist Maynard
Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."  In the general case,
everything on the web is just 1s and 0s.  But there's millions of
LiveJournal users who all have a profile page, hundreds of thousands
of Typepad users who have an "about me" page, tens of thousands of
company websites that have a "contact" page, and 40,000 Avon ladies
who have a personal homepage with their contact information.  Lots of
people maintain address books, and lots of people post contact
information.  Wouldn't it be nice if just a few of them marked up
their contact information with hCard?

Microformats are about finding commonalities (even in "the long tail",
especially in "the long tail") -- things lots of people are *already
doing anyway* -- and making them 1% better to get 1000% more out of
them.  If three people in the world post a picture of their albino cat
jumping over a fence while wearing a sombrero, I don't think we need a
microformat for that -- both because no one is doing it, and because
there's no value in finding it.  If 10,000 people started doing it
*and* there was a sudden upsurge of interest in distinguishing
pictures of fence-jumping sombrero-wearing albino cats from pictures
of fence-jumping fedora-wearing albino cats, I'd think about maybe
marking it up in some common way.

I hope this answers your question, which I have long since forgotten.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 12:18:26 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Wed Oct  5 12:18:28 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510051218j4f319969t1b558ee9ef41bc9f@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:

> Microformats are about finding commonalities (even in "the long tail",
> especially in "the long tail") -- things lots of people are *already
> doing anyway* -- and making them 1% better to get 1000% more out of
> them.  If three people in the world post a picture of their albino cat
> jumping over a fence while wearing a sombrero, I don't think we need a
> microformat for that -- both because no one is doing it, and because
> there's no value in finding it.  If 10,000 people started doing it
> *and* there was a sudden upsurge of interest in distinguishing
> pictures of fence-jumping sombrero-wearing albino cats from pictures
> of fence-jumping fedora-wearing albino cats, I'd think about maybe
> marking it up in some common way.
>
> I hope this answers your question, which I have long since forgotten.

Nope, your example misses the long tail point entirely.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 12:41:27 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Wed Oct  5 12:41:30 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510051218j4f319969t1b558ee9ef41bc9f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051218j4f319969t1b558ee9ef41bc9f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510051241s595ea4d1tce5f23a9f13a5110@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Danny Ayers  wrote:
> Nope, your example misses the long tail point entirely.

Well, we could play virtual optometrist, where I try to guess what you
mean, and you shoot them down one at a time.  Or you could try to
explain yourself better.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Wed Oct  5 13:15:11 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Wed Oct  5 13:15:16 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4344344F.9040801@blogmatrix.com>

Robert Sayre wrote:
> Adoption seems to be /okay/, but I'm still kind of pondering what
> these thing are for and what kind of apps use them. I would check the
> wiki, but it seems to be down, so I wonder if  there's an answer to
> the most frequently asked question around here:
> 
> "What are microformats for?"

Microformats are for codifying commonly used information-rich HTML 
content in such a way that semantic meaning can be machine extracted.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Wed Oct  5 13:18:06 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Wed Oct  5 13:18:11 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educating Others
In-Reply-To: <43441BDC.5070803@downes.ca>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<43441BDC.5070803@downes.ca>
Message-ID: <434434FE.90704@blogmatrix.com>

Stephen Downes wrote:
> p.s. I can't take it any more -- I've corrected the spelling of 
> 'Educating' in the subject line.  ;)

Oh common Stephen, we can't let you get away with that...

Regards, etc...
David

From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Wed Oct  5 13:23:50 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Wed Oct  5 13:23:55 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <4344344F.9040801@blogmatrix.com>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>
	<4344344F.9040801@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <43443656.50907@blogmatrix.com>

(Now I'm going to make the bad habit of following up to my own post.)

The creation of microformats is very much analogous to the creation of 
English language dictionaries, where common usage was examined, codified 
and standardized. Before dictionaries went into common use, there were 
many acceptable ways of spelling the same word; afterwards, writers 
looked dictionaries to find the correct way to spell words.

Microformats are the dictionary of XHTML semantic content.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
> Robert Sayre wrote:
> 
>> Adoption seems to be /okay/, but I'm still kind of pondering what
>> these thing are for and what kind of apps use them. I would check the
>> wiki, but it seems to be down, so I wonder if  there's an answer to
>> the most frequently asked question around here:
>>
>> "What are microformats for?"
> 
> 
> Microformats are for codifying commonly used information-rich HTML 
> content in such a way that semantic meaning can be machine extracted.
> 
> Regards, etc...
> David
> http://www.blogmatrix.com
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
> 
> 

From dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 13:35:16 2005
From: dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com (Dimitri Glazkov)
Date: Wed Oct  5 13:35:20 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educating Others
In-Reply-To: <434434FE.90704@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<43441BDC.5070803@downes.ca> <434434FE.90704@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: 

If all arguments already made still seem nebulous and baseless,
learning and understanding microformats can be viewed as just a great
way learn how to write good semantic markup, caring about HTML
semantics, caring about your Web data and its structure.

HTML was relegated to junk format by a great deal of developers, and
that is probably a big reason why it is so hard to start the
Renaissance (great post, Ryan, by the way:
http://theryanking.com/blog/archives/2005/10/05/the-dark-ages-of-the-web/)

My everyday work is far from creme de la creme of markup greats. I
work in HTML "skid row", populated by Dreamweaver "slicers" and
backend coders. Neither crowd "gets" HTML, neither crowd wants to.
Designer-types draw pretty pictures, coders spit out data. Everybody's
happy,  except nobody wins.

Sorry about the rambling...

:DG<
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Wed Oct  5 13:40:23 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Wed Oct  5 13:40:27 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43443A37.5070405@blogmatrix.com>

I've been trying to figure this one out Danny. What edge-cases are being 
written off by the microformat community?

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

Danny Ayers wrote:
> One thing I do find a little curious. A large proportion of systems on
> the Web have a long tail distribution - there's value in the
> thousands, millions of little thingies, not only the top 10. So I'm a
> little surprised to find so many people around these parts prepared to
> write off edge cases as so much cruft. As the Web grows, surely the
> sum of specific cases approaches the general case..?
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 13:45:48 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Wed Oct  5 13:45:52 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510051241s595ea4d1tce5f23a9f13a5110@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051218j4f319969t1b558ee9ef41bc9f@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051241s595ea4d1tce5f23a9f13a5110@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510051345j450db207o849e329f47cf28f9@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Mark Pilgrim  wrote:
> On 10/5/05, Danny Ayers  wrote:
> > Nope, your example misses the long tail point entirely.
>
> Well, we could play virtual optometrist, where I try to guess what you
> mean, and you shoot them down one at a time.  Or you could try to
> explain yourself better.

Ok, the long tail idea is not just about the case of 3 people who post
a picture of their albino cat jumping over a fence while wearing a
sombrero, versus the 10,000 people doing the same. It is about those
first 3 people, plus the 4 fence-jumping fedora-wearing albino cats,
plus the 2 fence-jumping fedora-wearing black-and-white cats...the
aggregated total of all of which may be well into the millions.

Each of these individual groups represents an edge case. You certainly
wouldn't want to create a format for each. But by the same token, a
format that dumbs down to the lowest common denominator (say, "cats")
is throwing much of the interesting information away from each of
those cases.

The way I think this may relate to the microformat development
process, is that by automatically rejecting edge cases on the basis
that they *are* edge cases, you may lose much of the potential value.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From chris at commerce.net  Wed Oct  5 14:02:31 2005
From: chris at commerce.net (Chris Hibbert)
Date: Wed Oct  5 14:02:17 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510051345j450db207o849e329f47cf28f9@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051218j4f319969t1b558ee9ef41bc9f@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051241s595ea4d1tce5f23a9f13a5110@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051345j450db207o849e329f47cf28f9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43443F67.1080801@commerce.net>

> Ok, the long tail idea is not just about the case of 3 people who post
> a picture of their albino cat jumping over a fence while wearing a
> sombrero, versus the 10,000 people doing the same. It is about those
> first 3 people, plus the 4 fence-jumping fedora-wearing albino cats,
> plus the 2 fence-jumping fedora-wearing black-and-white cats...the
> aggregated total of all of which may be well into the millions.

Amazon, Netflix, and eBay didn't make it big because they had separate 
categories and formats for each of the tiny niches in books, movies, and 
p2p sales.  They each supported a few categories, and lots of ability to 
describe differences, and allowed their customers to search the 
descriptions.  Flickr may want to allow arbitrary captions on the 
pictures, but it's unlikely they need a structured markup language for 
cats that includes what they're wearing, or what their color or breed 
is.  Standard simple markup with room for differentiation in the 
descriptions is sufficient, and I think that's what microformats push for.

Amazon wants to display titles, authors, cover photos and reviews.
Netflix wants to let people browse by genre, title, actors, and 
directors.  Neither needs to come up with genre-specific markup to serve 
all the tiny niches the companies never thought of before they became 
part of the phenomenon.

Chris
-- 
Chris Hibbert
Principal Investigator, Prediction Markets
chris.hibbert@commerce.net
http://zocalo.sourceforge.net/
From ryan at technorati.com  Wed Oct  5 14:07:30 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Wed Oct  5 14:07:33 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educating Others
In-Reply-To: <43441BEB.4000107@gunters.org>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<43441BEB.4000107@gunters.org>
Message-ID: 

On Oct 5, 2005, at 11:31 AM, Dougal Campbell wrote:

> Danny Ayers wrote:
>
>> One thing I do find a little curious. A large proportion of  
>> systems on
>> the Web have a long tail distribution - there's value in the
>> thousands, millions of little thingies, not only the top 10. So I'm a
>> little surprised to find so many people around these parts  
>> prepared to
>> write off edge cases as so much cruft. As the Web grows, surely the
>> sum of specific cases approaches the general case..?
>
> There's almost never going to be a "perfect" format that makes  
> everybody happy. Let the edge cases fight for supremacy amongst  
> themselves. I think that many edge cases will be able to "self- 
> repair", because those who fall on the edge can either find some  
> way to extend an existing format, or come up with a new one that's  
> to their liking.
>
> That's what microformats are doing in a broader sense. We're  
> extending [x]html by overloading class, rel, etc. to provide  
> additional semantics. Of course, many people have been doing that  
> for a long time anyways (unwittingly?).

And some wittingly: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf- 
interest/2000Mar/0103 (first paragraph).

> We're just organizing some of the more useful extensions in a  
> slightly more formalized way, right?

Aye, paving the cowpaths , if you will.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Wed Oct  5 14:16:54 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Wed Oct  5 14:16:59 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>

This makes me think about the mechanism by which syndication feeds were 
adopted by the blogosphere. Most of you folks come from the tech world, 
so the need for syndication probably wasn't a great leap. When I first 
started reading blogs in 2001, most tech blogs that I read provided 
syndication feeds; conversely, many or most blogs from the political 
side of things (for example, the 'warbloggers') did not.

I started BlogMatrix in 2001 as way of scraping blogs without 
syndication to produce feeds for them (as well as a few other things, 
such as tracking discussions). By late 2003, this service was almost 
entirely pointless.

What changed?

First, the sheer utility of syndication -- the ability of one's readers 
to use feed readers -- meant that content providers (i.e. bloggers) 
demanded that their software be capable of providing some sort of 
syndication feed. The common case was a 'blogspot' user which required 
only the adding of a template; further our, users of software such as 
GreyMatter simply moved on to something else, such as MT. Secondly (and 
related), major CMS providers -- blogger (later on) and MT (from the 
beginning) -- realized the utility of syndication and offered it as a 
standard feature.

This is almost exactly analogous to what's happening to microformats 
right now; we are just at the earliest stages of adoption. There's a 
small number of technology-savvy passionate users generating content [1] 
and there's a number of (admit it) privative tools consuming that 
content. One can easily imagine much more powerful tools consuming this 
information -- for example, IMDB [2] collecting reviews from the 
Internet in general rather than from "Usenet".

The low barrier to producing microformat content [it's just a little 
more markup] and the low barrier to consuming it [it's just a little 
parsing] identifies the classic virtuous cycle [3]. And once the ball 
starts rolling, how much trouble is it for blogger.com to add 'hcard' to 
their user profiles or some "web 2.0" site it easy to produce a calendar 
entry that can be inserted directly into a blog entry?

And I can't stress enough the "little more"/"little effort" part that 
makes this whole thing work. (IMHO) FOAF will be as useful in 3 years 
time as NAPLPS, the ISO/OSI model, or X.400; it will be steam-rollered 
by things people actually do, as opposed to speced.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

PS. Hopefully though, the horrible personality-driven schism that's 
fractured the syndication world won't happen with microformats!

[1] for example, http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-000374406-1
[2] for example, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091042/newsgroupreviews
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_circle

Mark Pilgrim wrote:
> This reminds me of the classic quote from the economist Maynard
> Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."  In the general case,
> everything on the web is just 1s and 0s.  But there's millions of
> LiveJournal users who all have a profile page, hundreds of thousands
> of Typepad users who have an "about me" page, tens of thousands of
> company websites that have a "contact" page, and 40,000 Avon ladies
> who have a personal homepage with their contact information.  Lots of
> people maintain address books, and lots of people post contact
> information.  Wouldn't it be nice if just a few of them marked up
> their contact information with hCard?
> 
> Microformats are about finding commonalities (even in "the long tail",
> especially in "the long tail") -- things lots of people are *already
> doing anyway* -- and making them 1% better to get 1000% more out of
> them.  If three people in the world post a picture of their albino cat
> jumping over a fence while wearing a sombrero, I don't think we need a
> microformat for that -- both because no one is doing it, and because
> there's no value in finding it.  If 10,000 people started doing it
> *and* there was a sudden upsurge of interest in distinguishing
> pictures of fence-jumping sombrero-wearing albino cats from pictures
> of fence-jumping fedora-wearing albino cats, I'd think about maybe
> marking it up in some common way.
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 14:22:06 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Wed Oct  5 14:22:10 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510051345j450db207o849e329f47cf28f9@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051218j4f319969t1b558ee9ef41bc9f@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051241s595ea4d1tce5f23a9f13a5110@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051345j450db207o849e329f47cf28f9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510051422o2edf6ae0lcef119e2fd8923ad@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Danny Ayers  wrote:
> sombrero, versus the 10,000 people doing the same. It is about those
> first 3 people, plus the 4 fence-jumping fedora-wearing albino cats,
> plus the 2 fence-jumping fedora-wearing black-and-white cats...the
> aggregated total of all of which may be well into the millions.
>
> Each of these individual groups represents an edge case. [...]

Ah, I see it now.  Thank you.

> The way I think this may relate to the microformat development
> process, is that by automatically rejecting edge cases on the basis
> that they *are* edge cases, you may lose much of the potential value.

I'm OK with that.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From luke.arno at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 14:27:48 2005
From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno)
Date: Wed Oct  5 14:27:51 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Evolution vs Intelligent Design
Message-ID: 

This debate has become so religious I figured I might as well go all the way.

On 10/5/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
>
> The creation of microformats is very much analogous to the creation of
> English language dictionaries, where common usage was examined, codified
> and standardized. Before dictionaries went into common use, there were
> many acceptable ways of spelling the same word; afterwards, writers
> looked dictionaries to find the correct way to spell words.
>
> Microformats are the dictionary of XHTML semantic content.
>

Bingo!

Everyone keeps asking what problems microformats solve. What are the use
cases? That is the wrong question. Who cares!?!

We don't need a problem statement. The problems are too many and too
fine grained and most importantly *already solved*

At it's core, I see this as a documentation project.

It's language. It's evolution not "intelligent design."

If this doesn't get me flamed, I don't know what will :-]

- Luke
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 14:38:15 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Wed Oct  5 14:38:18 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: <434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> This is almost exactly analogous to what's happening to microformats
> right now; we are just at the earliest stages of adoption. There's a
> small number of technology-savvy passionate users generating content [1]
> and there's a number of (admit it) privative tools consuming that
> content. One can easily imagine much more powerful tools consuming this
> information -- for example, IMDB [2] collecting reviews from the
> Internet in general rather than from "Usenet".

Or, for example, a major search engine providing an interface to
search for content that meets a certain set of license criteria.

http://search.yahoo.com/cc

> And I can't stress enough the "little more"/"little effort" part that
> makes this whole thing work. (IMHO) FOAF will be as useful in 3 years
> time as NAPLPS, the ISO/OSI model, or X.400; it will be steam-rollered
> by things people actually do, as opposed to speced.

FOAF is not the best analogy, because, ironically, DanBri's philosophy
towards the FOAF spec has always been "let's periodically crawl every
FOAF file we can find and sort elements by popularity, then add the
most popular ones to the spec."  FOAF has had some moderate success
(Typepad generates it by default), but I think it is hampered by a
separate issue that is one of the guiding principles of microformats:
FOAF data is an entirely separate file that can't be easily browsed by
humans, so it inevitably falls out of date as humans update the stuff
people can see and ignore everything else.  I know I had this problem
when I maintained a FOAF file.

I agree with your more general point that having tools generate stuff
by default makes that stuff an order of magnitude more common.  The
problem is getting there: getting past the phase where the view-source
cult (I mean that affectionately) are hand-editing their templates, to
the point where people start demanding tools that automate it. 
Microformats make that first phase easier, since it's just "a little
more markup" in an existing template, so the markup is more likely to
(a) be manually added in the first place, and (b) be kept current over
time.  Many people underestimate the importance of this phase.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 14:40:31 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Wed Oct  5 14:40:34 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Evolution vs Intelligent Design
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <14be96d30510051440g76c9050dsb9e8862629672818@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Luke Arno  wrote:
> At it's core, I see this as a documentation project.
>
> It's language. It's evolution not "intelligent design."
>
> If this doesn't get me flamed, I don't know what will :-]

But surely you can't be opposed to something so innocent-sounding as
"teaching the controversy"...

/me ducks

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From brian.suda at gmail.com  Wed Oct  5 14:58:16 2005
From: brian.suda at gmail.com (brian suda)
Date: Wed Oct  5 14:58:37 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds
	->	microformats
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>

Mark Pilgrim wrote:

>FOAF is not the best analogy, .... FOAF data is an entirely separate file that can't be easily browsed by humans, so it inevitably falls out of date as humans update the stuff
>people can see and ignore everything else.  I know I had this problem when I maintained a FOAF file.
>  
>
Just a side note, but if you combine Microformats (specifically hCard
and XFN) with GRDDL, it would be possible to generate a most of the FoaF
content dynamically. You could take the XSLTs from hCard and alter the
output to generate RDF instead of ascii (.vcf). This would prevent the
data drift from non-human readable content because it is being driven by
a public, human-readable, easily updatable, HTML source.

So microformats can be used in GRDDL to help bridge the gap between the
Semantic Web and the "non-semantic? web".

If you are having trouble wrapping your head around what microformats
are don't worry, if you loathe the idea of using XHTML, you can always
transform it to your own flavour of XML (and back). Microformats give
you added semantics from which you can glean information for other purposes.

-brian
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Wed Oct  5 15:04:11 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Wed Oct  5 15:04:17 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds
	->	microformats
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43444DDB.6090302@blogmatrix.com>

Mark Pilgrim wrote:
> I agree with your more general point that having tools generate stuff
> by default makes that stuff an order of magnitude more common.  The
> problem is getting there: getting past the phase where the view-source
> cult (I mean that affectionately) are hand-editing their templates, to
> the point where people start demanding tools that automate it. 
> Microformats make that first phase easier, since it's just "a little
> more markup" in an existing template, so the markup is more likely to
> (a) be manually added in the first place, and (b) be kept current over
> time.  Many people underestimate the importance of this phase.

Oh, I know what you're saying: there's always a "getting the ball 
rolling" problem -- the coefficient of static friction, I think we 
called it in Physics. But there's something about microformats that just 
_smells_ right to me; there's beeen lot's of great standards dumped by 
the wayside, but on the other hand, I can't say that I've seen many 
unuseful standards widely adopted.

This is earlier though. As I said the other day, we may look back in a 
few years and laugh:

BRIAN:
     I'm not the Messiah!
ARTHUR:
     I say You are, Lord, and I should know. I've followed a few.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Wed Oct  5 15:12:36 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Wed Oct  5 15:12:42 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication
	feeds	->	microformats
In-Reply-To: <43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>
References: 	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>

I just had a little nap; upon waking up I feel I may have been a little 
unfair to the FOAF crowd. The reason I used it as an example is that 
I've seen so many broken FOAF files it seemed evident that even 
supporters weren't particularly interested in keeping the files up to 
date (implying that there aren't that many consumers).

But if you go directly to a data store from XHTML, why bother with the 
intermediate step of FOAF?

To go a little further out on a limb, my personal belief is that in a 
couple of years time, the semantic web will be entirely associated with 
microformats or something very analogous (aka "the lowercase semantic 
web"). The uppercase folks will declare victory and move on, or become 
Ted Nelsons.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

brian suda wrote:
> Just a side note, but if you combine Microformats (specifically hCard
> and XFN) with GRDDL, it would be possible to generate a most of the FoaF
> content dynamically. You could take the XSLTs from hCard and alter the
> output to generate RDF instead of ascii (.vcf). This would prevent the
> data drift from non-human readable content because it is being driven by
> a public, human-readable, easily updatable, HTML source.
> 
> So microformats can be used in GRDDL to help bridge the gap between the
> Semantic Web and the "non-semantic? web".
> 
> If you are having trouble wrapping your head around what microformats
> are don't worry, if you loathe the idea of using XHTML, you can always
> transform it to your own flavour of XML (and back). Microformats give
> you added semantics from which you can glean information for other purposes.
> 
> -brian
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
> 
> 

From maetl at mcs.vuw.ac.nz  Wed Oct  5 16:45:42 2005
From: maetl at mcs.vuw.ac.nz (Mark Rickerby)
Date: Wed Oct  5 16:45:45 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com> <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: 

> To go a little further out on a limb, my personal belief is that in a
> couple of years time, the semantic web will be entirely associated with
> microformats or something very analogous (aka "the lowercase semantic
> web"). The uppercase folks will declare victory and move on, or become
> Ted Nelsons.

or: the uppercase semantic web will be a reflective mirror generated
from the lowercase web, where basic written content gets published,
transforms, and grows.

/M
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 02:37:01 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Thu Oct  6 02:37:04 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <43443A37.5070405@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<43443A37.5070405@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510060237g74470a11gdae2e8390dfd6d05@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> I've been trying to figure this one out Danny. What edge-cases are being
> written off by the microformat community?

I was just extrapolating from Mark's statement:
[[
Some people (Scott, Lisa, others) look at this and say "what about
this edge case?" or "how do you combine them?" or "I need something
with rigid structure" or "how do you validate them" or whatever.  And
these are all obvious questions that form interesting permathreads on
mailing lists around the world.  And we just don't care.
]]

--

http://dannyayers.com
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Thu Oct  6 02:57:22 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Thu Oct  6 02:57:27 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Main_Page of wiki trashed?
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd05082712022da397e7@mail.gmail.com>
References: <1f2ed5cd05082712022da397e7@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4344F502.6020409@blogmatrix.com>

Perhaps someone with a little more Wiki experience knows how to back out 
  the change "66.41.77.236" made?

http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

From stephen at downes.ca  Thu Oct  6 02:58:18 2005
From: stephen at downes.ca (Stephen Downes)
Date: Thu Oct  6 03:00:16 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Main_Page of wiki trashed?
In-Reply-To: <4344F502.6020409@blogmatrix.com>
References: <1f2ed5cd05082712022da397e7@mail.gmail.com>
	<4344F502.6020409@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <4344F53A.8000804@downes.ca>

Done. Just select 'history', select the previous version, select 'edit' 
and then 'save'.

Some wiki systems have a simpler rollback link, but I didn't see it.

-- Stephen

David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:

> Perhaps someone with a little more Wiki experience knows how to back 
> out  the change "66.41.77.236" made?
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page
>
> Regards, etc...
> David
> http://www.blogmatrix.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss

-- 

Stephen Downes  ~  Research Officer  ~  National Research Council Canada
http://www.downes.ca  ~  stephen@downes.ca         __\|/__ Free Learning

--

From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 03:13:19 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Thu Oct  6 03:13:22 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <43443F67.1080801@commerce.net>
References: 
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051218j4f319969t1b558ee9ef41bc9f@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051241s595ea4d1tce5f23a9f13a5110@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051345j450db207o849e329f47cf28f9@mail.gmail.com>
	<43443F67.1080801@commerce.net>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510060313gb70caa4j87097ab1da067048@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Chris Hibbert  wrote:
> > Ok, the long tail idea is not just about the case of 3 people who post
> > a picture of their albino cat jumping over a fence while wearing a
> > sombrero, versus the 10,000 people doing the same. It is about those
> > first 3 people, plus the 4 fence-jumping fedora-wearing albino cats,
> > plus the 2 fence-jumping fedora-wearing black-and-white cats...the
> > aggregated total of all of which may be well into the millions.
>
> Amazon, Netflix, and eBay didn't make it big because they had separate
> categories and formats for each of the tiny niches in books, movies, and
> p2p sales.  They each supported a few categories, and lots of ability to
> describe differences, and allowed their customers to search the
> descriptions.  Flickr may want to allow arbitrary captions on the
> pictures, but it's unlikely they need a structured markup language for
> cats that includes what they're wearing, or what their color or breed
> is.  Standard simple markup with room for differentiation in the
> descriptions is sufficient, and I think that's what microformats push for.
>
> Amazon wants to display titles, authors, cover photos and reviews.
> Netflix wants to let people browse by genre, title, actors, and
> directors.  Neither needs to come up with genre-specific markup to serve
> all the tiny niches the companies never thought of before they became
> part of the phenomenon.

Yep, sure. But I was thinking of microformats more from the point of
view as an approach to creating markup specifications, more of a
meta-level. If the process systematically excludes edge cases, then
you're looking at something that might expand one particular 1% to
1000% (say Amazon's use case), but arbitrarily leave another 1% at 1%
(say Netflix's) because it doesn't mesh with the Intelligent Design of
Mark's 80%.

I honestly don't know whether the long tail kind of analysis works at
the format level. "XML has failed on the Web" because the leading
formats are HTML or (often broken from an XML pov) RSS. There are
numerous successful XML formats in use on the Web, but I doubt their
aggregated document count outnumbers that of HTML.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 03:40:11 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Thu Oct  6 03:40:14 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Evolution vs Intelligent Design
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510060340v69149e6cucfe005320b16ec84@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/5/05, Luke Arno  wrote:
> This debate has become so religious I figured I might as well go all the way.
>
> On 10/5/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> >
> > The creation of microformats is very much analogous to the creation of
> > English language dictionaries, where common usage was examined, codified
> > and standardized. Before dictionaries went into common use, there were
> > many acceptable ways of spelling the same word; afterwards, writers
> > looked dictionaries to find the correct way to spell words.
> >
> > Microformats are the dictionary of XHTML semantic content.

Nice, very nice.

> It's language. It's evolution not "intelligent design."

Hmm, that seems a stretch. The dictionary analogy could perhaps be
described as natural selection, a filtering of spelling that works for
people. But is that filtering something from a natural environment
(such as the Web) or an artificial design thing? Also I don't see much
mutation (I'm not sure tweaks are enough for the origin of species),
and the breeding that's taking place does largely seem to be within a
fairly closed community ;-)

In the context of software some intelligent design is needed to get
things started. I guess my concerns from the "Educationg Others"
thread could maybe be summarised as the microformats development
process being weighted towards Selection rather than Intelligent
Reaction (to borrow Adam Bosworth's phrase) to issues raised.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 05:52:49 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Thu Oct  6 05:52:52 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com> <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/6/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> I just had a little nap; upon waking up I feel I may have been a little
> unfair to the FOAF crowd. The reason I used it as an example is that
> I've seen so many broken FOAF files it seemed evident that even
> supporters weren't particularly interested in keeping the files up to
> date (implying that there aren't that many consumers).

Yep, FOAF is actually an *awful* example for the (valid) point you
were making ;-)

FOAF primarily provides a *model* for the Person construct, attributes
of it and relations between those constructs. FOAF files are one kind
of serialization of that model (RDF/XML). But much of the same
information can be expressed in other formats, such as XFN. The
particular serialization is of secondary importance.

I think there's a nice analogy here: In the same way XHTML acts as a
substrate for microformats, RDF is the base for micromodels.

Microformats are being designed in such a way that the syntax of each
can be (relatively) freely mixed in a document. RDF vocabularies are
designed in such a way that the model of each can be freely mixed on
the Web.

If there is a model and a mapping from the syntax to that model, it is
possible to view microformats as domain-specific serializations of RDF
- the general technique is the GRDDL [1] to which Brian referred).
It's possible to automatically read microformats into RDF systems -
the Redland RDF toolkit has support for this built in.

A little while back in an exchange with Tantek he said something along
the lines of "it doesn't really matter what kind of store you have in
the backend", in the sense that microformats could equally be
produced/consumed by SQL DBs, XML DBs or RDF DBs. True enough, he was
emphasizing the role microformats can play in exposing a standard
interface. But in the RDF case this can go further - a shared data
model can be exposed to the Web as well.

In some respects microformats and RDF are orthogonal, one being about
syntax the other about model. But they're both pointing in the same
general direction, improving the Web through explicit data. When
techniques like these are used to put unambiguous machine-readable
data on the Web, the lower-case and upper-case semantic webs are one
and the same.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/grddl/
--

http://dannyayers.com
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Thu Oct  6 06:19:38 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Thu Oct  6 06:19:43 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds
	->	microformats
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>
	<43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>

Consider all the microformat data already out there on the web -- for 
example, all the events in 'evdb'. Add to the mix the XML/RDF data sets 
available -- for example, lists of airports, FOAF files and so forth. 
And finally, the various tools that have been made to manipulate and 
query XML (in general), RDF (in particular) and semantic-web data (more so).

Now consider the following queries:
- where could I fly to visit a friend and see the San Diego Chargers 
play on a weekend that I have free
- if I did fly there, what's the names of my friend's family and pets
- (your variant query here)

To pull these different threads together as concrete demonstration of 
the power of the upper/lower case semantic web would be, like, the coup 
of the decade. But who among us could rise to such a challange...? :-)

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

Danny Ayers wrote:
> A little while back in an exchange with Tantek he said something along
> the lines of "it doesn't really matter what kind of store you have in
> the backend", in the sense that microformats could equally be
> produced/consumed by SQL DBs, XML DBs or RDF DBs. True enough, he was
> emphasizing the role microformats can play in exposing a standard
> interface. But in the RDF case this can go further - a shared data
> model can be exposed to the Web as well.
> 
> In some respects microformats and RDF are orthogonal, one being about
> syntax the other about model. But they're both pointing in the same
> general direction, improving the Web through explicit data. When
> techniques like these are used to put unambiguous machine-readable
> data on the Web, the lower-case and upper-case semantic webs are one
> and the same.
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 07:23:21 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Thu Oct  6 07:23:25 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: <4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com> <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>
	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/6/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> Consider all the microformat data already out there on the web -- for
> example, all the events in 'evdb'. Add to the mix the XML/RDF data sets
> available -- for example, lists of airports, FOAF files and so forth.
> And finally, the various tools that have been made to manipulate and
> query XML (in general), RDF (in particular) and semantic-web data (more so).
>
> Now consider the following queries:
> - where could I fly to visit a friend and see the San Diego Chargers
> play on a weekend that I have free
> - if I did fly there, what's the names of my friend's family and pets
> - (your variant query here)
>
> To pull these different threads together as concrete demonstration of
> the power of the upper/lower case semantic web would be, like, the coup
> of the decade. But who among us could rise to such a challange...? :-)

Heh.
It is funny, that kind of aim is clearly there in TimBL's old design
notes, but still there's no major app that does it. It gets more
remarkable by the day, now there are microformats to supply the data
(with GRDDL getting it into the store(s)) and SPARQL to offer a
relatively easy route of querying cross-domain. There are still
significant issues like scalability and querying across sites, but
most of the specs are in place and the basic kit needed has already
been implemented, available off-the-shelf. e.g. I've been playing with
integrating my to-do list kind of project info with material from RSS
feeds, HTML-based docs and FOAF using Redland (with Python). Mostly a
simple matter of programming ;-)

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Thu Oct  6 08:23:53 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Thu Oct  6 08:23:59 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with XHTML
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>
	<43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>

This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last two 
months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.

Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in the 
XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive points I 
see from this are:

- scripts, such as Greasemonkey ones, won't unnecessarily scan through 
XHTML documents looking for information that is not there; after all, 
it's reasonable to expect that if this all works out, there could be 
hundreds of possible microformats, many developed in a decentralized 
manner or perhaps even one off (like within a corporate environment)
- reducing the possibility of 'accidental' recognition of microformats 
that really aren't (for example, a listing of someone's Holiday CARDs).

This could be done with a header link [1] to the XMDP profile, for example.

...

There may also be need a profile [2] added to the  to make this 
happen.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links

From connect at stevenR2.com  Thu Oct  6 09:00:08 2005
From: connect at stevenR2.com (Steven Livingstone)
Date: Thu Oct  6 09:00:14 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
Message-ID: <031b01c5ca8f$0732c8f0$8109a8c0@dev>

hmm - been a (relativelty new) passive observer until now.

I would say pro's and cons. As you say, identifying up front would be
useful - scan the header and index. Easy.

However (and please correct me if i am wrong), one intention of microformats
is trying to integrate people who generally don't want to learn & write
dublin core etc at the top of their web page, or use Xml/xhtml with
namespaces etc, to create sections of smart data. I think getting them as
far as the html would be good.

It may be that soon you get "inset microformat" options on the html editors,
wikis and blogs of the world which would simply ask you to enter information
into dialog boxes with no HTML needed. In this case it would be trivial for
it to add it to the header as you suggest. At this point however you may be
as well using Xml, namespaces and schema.

I guess i'm indifferent to the idea :) Put another way - i wouldn't expect
most people to manually do it, so there may need to be an alternative way of
mining the microformats for a given page.

steven :: http://stevenR2.com

Join my network at Linked In :
https://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=2255447

> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "David Janes -- BlogMatrix" 
> To: "Microformats Discuss" 
> Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 4:23 PM
> Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with 
> XHTML
>
>
>> This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last two 
>> months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.
>>
>> Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in the 
>> XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive points I 
>> see from this are:
>>
>> - scripts, such as Greasemonkey ones, won't unnecessarily scan through 
>> XHTML documents looking for information that is not there; after all, 
>> it's reasonable to expect that if this all works out, there could be 
>> hundreds of possible microformats, many developed in a decentralized 
>> manner or perhaps even one off (like within a corporate environment)
>> - reducing the possibility of 'accidental' recognition of microformats 
>> that really aren't (for example, a listing of someone's Holiday CARDs).
>>
>> This could be done with a header link [1] to the XMDP profile, for 
>> example.
>>
>> 
>> 
>> >  rel="microformat"
>>  title="hcard"
>>  href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-profile.xmdp" />
>> ...
>>
>> There may also be need a profile [2] added to the  to make this 
>> happen.
>>
>> Regards, etc...
>> David
>> http://www.blogmatrix.com
>>
>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3
>> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> microformats-discuss mailing list
>> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
>> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>>
> 

From luke.arno at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 09:17:08 2005
From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno)
Date: Thu Oct  6 09:17:11 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Evolution vs Intelligent Design
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510060340v69149e6cucfe005320b16ec84@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<1f2ed5cd0510060340v69149e6cucfe005320b16ec84@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/6/05, Danny Ayers  wrote:
> On 10/5/05, Luke Arno  wrote:
> > This debate has become so religious I figured I might as well go all the way.
> >
> > On 10/5/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> > >
> > > The creation of microformats is very much analogous to the creation of
> > > English language dictionaries, where common usage was examined, codified
> > > and standardized. Before dictionaries went into common use, there were
> > > many acceptable ways of spelling the same word; afterwards, writers
> > > looked dictionaries to find the correct way to spell words.
> > >
> > > Microformats are the dictionary of XHTML semantic content.
>
> Nice, very nice.
>
> > It's language. It's evolution not "intelligent design."
>
> Hmm, that seems a stretch. The dictionary analogy could perhaps be
> described as natural selection, a filtering of spelling that works for
> people. But is that filtering something from a natural environment
> (such as the Web) or an artificial design thing? Also I don't see much
> mutation (I'm not sure tweaks are enough for the origin of species),
> and the breeding that's taking place does largely seem to be within a
> fairly closed community ;-)
>

I wasn't speaking of evolution within the microformats community. I was
referring to evolution of semantics in markup across the Web.

It is not just a metaphor. Language is literal evolution. Check out chapter
10 of "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.

> In the context of software some intelligent design is needed to get
> things started. I guess my concerns from the "Educationg Others"
> thread could maybe be summarised as the microformats development
> process being weighted towards Selection rather than Intelligent
> Reaction (to borrow Adam Bosworth's phrase) to issues raised.
>

I don't even like the phrase "microformats development" for what is
happening here. That is why I object to requiring an overarching problem
statement for microformats. It is not a development effort at its core.

Individual microformats have problem statements but observe step 2
in the microformats process.

http://microformats.org/wiki/process

I do agree with you that a little intelligence and fore site is in
order as well.
Dawkins writes at the end of the chapter sited above:

"We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of our selfish replicators."

- Luke
From luke.arno at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 09:54:41 2005
From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno)
Date: Thu Oct  6 09:54:44 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: <43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com> <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>
	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/6/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last two
> months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.
>
> Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in the
> XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive points I
> see from this are:
>
> - scripts, such as Greasemonkey ones, won't unnecessarily scan through
> XHTML documents looking for information that is not there; after all,
> it's reasonable to expect that if this all works out, there could be
> hundreds of possible microformats, many developed in a decentralized
> manner or perhaps even one off (like within a corporate environment)
> - reducing the possibility of 'accidental' recognition of microformats
> that really aren't (for example, a listing of someone's Holiday CARDs).
>
> This could be done with a header link [1] to the XMDP profile, for example.
>
> 
> 
>    rel="microformat"
>   title="hcard"
>   href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-profile.xmdp" />
> ...
>
> There may also be need a profile [2] added to the  to make this
> happen.
>

This is, in fact currently done with the profile attribute of the head element.

In XHTML2.0, it looks like this will get nicer by moving into a link

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-metaAttributes.html#s_metaAttributesmodule

- Luke
From tantek at cs.stanford.edu  Thu Oct  6 10:04:54 2005
From: tantek at cs.stanford.edu (Tantek =?ISO-8859-1?B?xw==?=elik)
Date: Thu Oct  6 10:05:03 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: 
Message-ID: 

On 10/6/05 9:54 AM, "Luke Arno"  wrote:

> On 10/6/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
>> This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last two
>> months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.
>> 
>> Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in the
>> XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive points I
>> see from this are:
>> 
>> - scripts, such as Greasemonkey ones, won't unnecessarily scan through
>> XHTML documents looking for information that is not there; after all,
>> it's reasonable to expect that if this all works out, there could be
>> hundreds of possible microformats, many developed in a decentralized
>> manner or perhaps even one off (like within a corporate environment)
>> - reducing the possibility of 'accidental' recognition of microformats
>> that really aren't (for example, a listing of someone's Holiday CARDs).
>> 
>> This could be done with a header link [1] to the XMDP profile, for example.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> >   rel="microformat"
>>   title="hcard"
>>   href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-profile.xmdp" />
>> ...
>> 
>> There may also be need a profile [2] added to the  to make this
>> happen.
>> 
> 
> This is, in fact currently done with the profile attribute of the head
> element.

Right, with

This is discussed in the XMDP description:

 http://gmpg.org/xmdp/description

> In XHTML2.0, it looks like this will get nicer by moving into a link
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-metaAttributes.html#s_metaAttributesmodule

Yes, and indeed, we are considering simply adding rel="profile" to XMDP as
well.  I still have about 100 emails regarding that topic to digest and
attempt to summarize, so don't worry, I haven't forgotten about them.  For
any additional discussion on rel="profile", I would ask that folks check the
archives to see what has already been said, and hold off for a bit in the
hopes I can get that summary/conclusions written up which will hopefully
answer a bunch of questions.

Thanks,

Tantek

From drernie at opendarwin.org  Thu Oct  6 10:15:54 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Thu Oct  6 10:15:58 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] DRAFT: "Examples" wiki page
Message-ID: <65D0B0D0-BA25-428E-B47D-FC1214FA67EA@opendarwin.org>

Hi all,

I was trying to create some new "-examples", but couldn't find a  
good, actionable resource on the best way to do that.  So, I drafted  
some ideas, culled from existing pages, onto a new wiki article:

http://microformats.org/wiki/examples

Hopefully this will encourage the formation of optimal -example  
pages.  Critiques and suggestions welcome.

-- Ernie P.
------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 11:07:17 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Thu Oct  6 11:07:20 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Evolution vs Intelligent Design
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<1f2ed5cd0510060340v69149e6cucfe005320b16ec84@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510061107r6eaa33eco6f3c78c6b624b733@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/6/05, Luke Arno  wrote:

> I wasn't speaking of evolution within the microformats community. I was
> referring to evolution of semantics in markup across the Web.

Hmm, I'm still not convinced.

> It is not just a metaphor. Language is literal evolution. Check out chapter
> 10 of "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins makes a good case around memes competing for human attention
in the cultural environment. I'm not so sure about "language is
literal evolution", or the equivalence of descriptive markup
(delimited for the benefit of computers) to human languages.

> I don't even like the phrase "microformats development" for what is
> happening here. That is why I object to requiring an overarching problem
> statement for microformats. It is not a development effort at its core.
>
> Individual microformats have problem statements but observe step 2
> in the microformats process.
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/process

You mean "Document Current Behavior"? I just visited the review
research cited as an example. I happen to have produced a review
vocabulary myself, the listing on that page is:

----
 REV
    * RDF Review Vocabulary: http://www.purl.org/stuff/rev
          o Supposedly deployed in FilmTrust
(http://trust.mindswap.org/FilmTrust/). Unable to verify by going to
site.
----

The title is wrong, the vocabulary *is* used in FilmTrust as 5 seconds
with Google would have verified. Which leaves the link. That's this
bit of current behaviour documented?

> I do agree with you that a little intelligence and fore site is in
> order as well.
> Dawkins writes at the end of the chapter sited above:
>
> "We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of our selfish replicators."

Yeah, but for a scientist he doesn't half talk about religion a lot.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From luke.arno at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 11:11:35 2005
From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno)
Date: Thu Oct  6 11:11:39 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Style for XMDP
Message-ID: 

Is there a standard-ish CSS for an XMDP document that I could use?

Also, in XMDP it is suggested that the id attribute on a  be the
same as the name of the property. This is suggested but not required.

Would it be more consistent to do something more like this:

- a rel of "thingy" gets id="relThingy"
- a class of "thingy" gets id="classThingy"

?

I bring this up because I am trying to write an XMDP that has a rel and
class of the same name and I hate to introduce inconsistency in naming
even in such a small way. I am probably being too anal.

Finally, should I be discussing this here or is there a more appropriate list?

Thanks.

- Luke
From dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 11:25:05 2005
From: dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com (Dimitri Glazkov)
Date: Thu Oct  6 11:25:07 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Result set: thoughts and ideas?
Message-ID: 

Ok, this is not a microformat proposal. It could probably qualify as a
use case, but it hasn't been in public use yet. I just wanted to bring
this in front of the list for comments, suggestions, and name-calling.

The project that I am currently working on calls for a wide variety of
tabular/list data (result sets) being displayed. The content is fairly
diverse (from tabular document collections to lists of calendar
events), with the only commonality being such that the consumer of
this data needs some way to query and manipulate data (view N results
at a time, starting from Mth result, search, sort, filter, hide/show
columns, add rows, delete rows, etc.)

I decided to encapsulate this common need into some sort of a
consistent markup representation, so that any set, regardless of
content, could be queried and manipulated using the same set of
controls. As a big believer in unobrtusive scripting, I thought that
this consistent markup would allow the same script to bind to any
result set to provide advanced UI/UX.

The work is still very much in progress, but I wanted the smart folk
to take a look at it and provide some insight as to whether I am a
crazy nut of some sort.

Consider this example: http://glazkov.com/Resources/Code/Grid/Grid.aspx

Of particular interest is the form at the top of the table, which
provides controls for two operations:

* Ranging -- defining a range of results to return
* Sorting -- sorting result set by a specified facet (table column in
this example)

There are other query operations possible, but let's not muddy the
waters for now.

This form can already be used to build fairly complicated queries
(show 10 items starting from 34th, sorted by size), while keeping the
controls completely context-agnostic. The only thing that needs to be
known is the format in which these controls are represented.

Take a look at the contents of ".xlist .range" element. They provide
information on:

* total number of items in the result set
* current starting item in the set and what query string parameter to
use to request another starting item
* current number of items displayed and a way to request another
number of items.

So, for instance, if the data is the archive of all blog posts, you
have a tool that allows you to query your blog data in pretty much any
shape or fashion.

The markup-only UI is very primitive, but I believe it is a
semancially correct way to document a protocol using HTML, it
expresses the intent of the protocol most directly, and it is fully
functional without any additional means.

Speaking of additional means, here's an example of a very simplistic
"friendlier" UI bound to this markup (Javascript):

http://glazkov.com/Resources/Code/Grid/DefaultPager.aspx

As you can see, we now have "Google-like" paging -- obviously, the
markup stays the same. With a little effort, this can be expanded to
bind more sophisticated UI, along the lines of Rico's LiveGrid
(http://openrico.org/rico/livegrid.page). In that particular case, the
script on this page would call the page itself to retrieve data using
XHR -- no extra API exposure needed.

Next step: implementing data manipulation, or allowing to modify data.

I guess the point of the exercise is: if a consistent format exists to
express a protocol of querying/manipulating a result set, it becomes
possible to bind to this protocol without needing to know the context
of the data.

Thoughts? Comments? I welcome any kind of feedback, even if it's
merciless public spanking.

:DG<
From luke.arno at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 11:28:33 2005
From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno)
Date: Thu Oct  6 11:28:36 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Evolution vs Intelligent Design
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510061107r6eaa33eco6f3c78c6b624b733@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<1f2ed5cd0510060340v69149e6cucfe005320b16ec84@mail.gmail.com>

	<1f2ed5cd0510061107r6eaa33eco6f3c78c6b624b733@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/6/05, Danny Ayers  wrote:
> On 10/6/05, Luke Arno  wrote:
>
> > I wasn't speaking of evolution within the microformats community. I was
> > referring to evolution of semantics in markup across the Web.
>
> Hmm, I'm still not convinced.
>

I'm not trying to sell you anything.

> > It is not just a metaphor. Language is literal evolution. Check out chapter
> > 10 of "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
>
> Dawkins makes a good case around memes competing for human attention
> in the cultural environment. I'm not so sure about "language is
> literal evolution", or the equivalence of descriptive markup
> (delimited for the benefit of computers) to human languages.
>

I believe he goes on a bit about birdsong before he dives in to memes.
("Dive in to Memes" - MarkP should write a book :)
This is the bit I was thinking of.

> > I don't even like the phrase "microformats development" for what is
> > happening here. That is why I object to requiring an overarching problem
> > statement for microformats. It is not a development effort at its core.
> >
> > Individual microformats have problem statements but observe step 2
> > in the microformats process.
> >
> > http://microformats.org/wiki/process
>
> You mean "Document Current Behavior"? I just visited the review
> research cited as an example. I happen to have produced a review
> vocabulary myself, the listing on that page is:
>
> ----
>  REV
>     * RDF Review Vocabulary: http://www.purl.org/stuff/rev
>           o Supposedly deployed in FilmTrust
> (http://trust.mindswap.org/FilmTrust/). Unable to verify by going to
> site.
> ----
>
> The title is wrong, the vocabulary *is* used in FilmTrust as 5 seconds
> with Google would have verified. Which leaves the link. That's this
> bit of current behaviour documented?
>

Sounds like you should update the wiki.

> > I do agree with you that a little intelligence and fore site is in
> > order as well.
> > Dawkins writes at the end of the chapter sited above:
> >
> > "We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of our selfish replicators."
>
> Yeah, but for a scientist he doesn't half talk about religion a lot.
>

Did you mean to write:

"Yeah, but for a scientist doesn't he half talk about religion a lot?"

If so, that is ad hominem.

- Luke
From kevin at lawver.net  Thu Oct  6 11:41:38 2005
From: kevin at lawver.net (Kevin Lawver)
Date: Thu Oct  6 11:41:46 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Style for XMDP
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <43456FE2.9030300@lawver.net>

Here's the one I've been using.  Feel free to 
appropriate/mangle/munge/discard.

Cheers,
Kevin
http://lawver.net

Luke Arno wrote:
> Is there a standard-ish CSS for an XMDP document that I could use?
> 
> Also, in XMDP it is suggested that the id attribute on a 
 be the
> same as the name of the property. This is suggested but not required.
> 
> Would it be more consistent to do something more like this:
> 
> - a rel of "thingy" gets id="relThingy"
> - a class of "thingy" gets id="classThingy"
> 
> ?
> 
> I bring this up because I am trying to write an XMDP that has a rel and
> class of the same name and I hate to introduce inconsistency in naming
> even in such a small way. I am probably being too anal.
> 
> Finally, should I be discussing this here or is there a more appropriate list?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> - Luke
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
> 

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From ryan at technorati.com  Thu Oct  6 11:51:24 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Thu Oct  6 11:51:29 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Main_Page of wiki trashed?
In-Reply-To: <4344F53A.8000804@downes.ca>
References: <1f2ed5cd05082712022da397e7@mail.gmail.com>
	<4344F502.6020409@blogmatrix.com> <4344F53A.8000804@downes.ca>
Message-ID: 

Thanks Stephen.

And to everyone- always feel free to fix problems with the wiki- I  
know many of you do and I thank you for that.

-ryan

On Oct 6, 2005, at 2:58 AM, Stephen Downes wrote:

> Done. Just select 'history', select the previous version, select  
> 'edit' and then 'save'.
>
> Some wiki systems have a simpler rollback link, but I didn't see it.
>
> -- Stephen
>
> David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
>
>
>> Perhaps someone with a little more Wiki experience knows how to  
>> back out  the change "66.41.77.236" made?
>>
>> http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page
>>
>> Regards, etc...
>> David
>> http://www.blogmatrix.com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> microformats-discuss mailing list
>> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
>> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> Stephen Downes  ~  Research Officer  ~  National Research Council  
> Canada
> http://www.downes.ca  ~  stephen@downes.ca         __\|/__ Free  
> Learning
>
> --
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Thu Oct  6 11:55:17 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Thu Oct  6 11:55:22 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Main_Page of wiki trashed?
In-Reply-To: <4344F53A.8000804@downes.ca>
References: <1f2ed5cd05082712022da397e7@mail.gmail.com>
	<4344F502.6020409@blogmatrix.com> <4344F53A.8000804@downes.ca>
Message-ID: <8E2F19EC-F330-4C96-B40C-48A97032FA51@technorati.com>

On Oct 6, 2005, at 2:58 AM, Stephen Downes wrote:

> Done. Just select 'history', select the previous version, select  
> 'edit' and then 'save'.
>
> Some wiki systems have a simpler rollback link, but I didn't see it.

Oh, and, btw, there's a cleaner what to do rollback with MediaWiki  
(though you may have to be an admin to do it.

1. Click on "History"
2. Do a diff from the current version to the version you'd like to  
roll back to.
3. Then there'll be a link labeled "rollback" on the right side of  
the top.

Once again, you might have to be an admin to do this (which currently  
is just Tantek and me). If we have more problems, I might look into  
making some more admins.

Thanks,
ryan

> David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
>
>
>> Perhaps someone with a little more Wiki experience knows how to  
>> back out  the change "66.41.77.236" made?
>>
>> http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page
>>
>> Regards, etc...
>> David
>> http://www.blogmatrix.com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> microformats-discuss mailing list
>> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
>> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> Stephen Downes  ~  Research Officer  ~  National Research Council  
> Canada
> http://www.downes.ca  ~  stephen@downes.ca         __\|/__ Free  
> Learning
>
> --
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Thu Oct  6 12:24:05 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Thu Oct  6 12:24:14 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] DRAFT: "Examples" wiki page
In-Reply-To: <65D0B0D0-BA25-428E-B47D-FC1214FA67EA@opendarwin.org>
References: <65D0B0D0-BA25-428E-B47D-FC1214FA67EA@opendarwin.org>
Message-ID: 

On Oct 6, 2005, at 10:15 AM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I was trying to create some new "-examples", but couldn't find a  
> good, actionable resource on the best way to do that.  So, I  
> drafted some ideas, culled from existing pages, onto a new wiki  
> article:
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/examples
>
> Hopefully this will encourage the formation of optimal -example  
> pages.  Critiques and suggestions welcome.

Awesome. Thanks.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Thu Oct  6 12:28:17 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Thu Oct  6 12:28:22 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: <43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>
References: 	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>
	<43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: 

On Oct 6, 2005, at 8:23 AM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:

> This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last  
> two months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.
>
> Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in  
> the XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive  
> points I see from this are

Already covered by profile URIs.

See http://gmpg.org/xmdp/

-ryan

> - scripts, such as Greasemonkey ones, won't unnecessarily scan  
> through XHTML documents looking for information that is not there;  
> after all, it's reasonable to expect that if this all works out,  
> there could be hundreds of possible microformats, many developed in  
> a decentralized manner or perhaps even one off (like within a  
> corporate environment)
> - reducing the possibility of 'accidental' recognition of  
> microformats that really aren't (for example, a listing of  
> someone's Holiday CARDs).
>
> This could be done with a header link [1] to the XMDP profile, for  
> example.
>
> 
> 
>   rel="microformat"
>  title="hcard"
>  href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-profile.xmdp" />
> ...
>
> There may also be need a profile [2] added to the  to make  
> this happen.
>
> Regards, etc...
> David
> http://www.blogmatrix.com
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://m

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From ryan at technorati.com  Thu Oct  6 12:36:16 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Thu Oct  6 12:36:21 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>
	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On Oct 5, 2005, at 2:38 PM, Mark Pilgrim wrote:
>
> Or, for example, a major search engine providing an interface to
> search for content that meets a certain set of license criteria.
>
> http://search.yahoo.com/cc

And, rumor has it, they use http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag,  
ignoring the RDF.

:D

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From joe.gregorio at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 13:07:59 2005
From: joe.gregorio at gmail.com (Joe Gregorio)
Date: Thu Oct  6 13:08:03 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com> <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>
	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>

Message-ID: <3f1451f50510061307y2e7c76di8e7fb1cb980acc65@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/6/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> On Oct 6, 2005, at 8:23 AM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
>
> > This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last
> > two months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.
> >
> > Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in
> > the XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive
> > points I see from this are
>
> Already covered by profile URIs.
>
> See http://gmpg.org/xmdp/

Yes, but that doesn't cover the case when there is no  element,
for example
when transporting xhtml around via Atom.

   -joe

--
Joe Gregorio        http://bitworking.org
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 13:13:30 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Thu Oct  6 13:13:33 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Evolution vs Intelligent Design
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<1f2ed5cd0510060340v69149e6cucfe005320b16ec84@mail.gmail.com>

	<1f2ed5cd0510061107r6eaa33eco6f3c78c6b624b733@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510061313s3b4911c3y3d32776110c49434@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/6/05, Luke Arno  wrote:

> > > Individual microformats have problem statements but observe step 2
> > > in the microformats process.
> > >
> > > http://microformats.org/wiki/process
> >
> > You mean "Document Current Behavior"? I just visited the review
> > research cited as an example. I happen to have produced a review
> > vocabulary myself, the listing on that page is:
> >
> > ----
> >  REV
> >     * RDF Review Vocabulary: http://www.purl.org/stuff/rev
> >           o Supposedly deployed in FilmTrust
> > (http://trust.mindswap.org/FilmTrust/). Unable to verify by going to
> > site.
> > ----
> >
> > The title is wrong, the vocabulary *is* used in FilmTrust as 5 seconds
> > with Google would have verified. Which leaves the link. That's this
> > bit of current behaviour documented?
> >
>
> Sounds like you should update the wiki.

...and send the research back in time?

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 13:21:48 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Thu Oct  6 13:21:51 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: <3f1451f50510061307y2e7c76di8e7fb1cb980acc65@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com> <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>
	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>

	<3f1451f50510061307y2e7c76di8e7fb1cb980acc65@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510061321w2c236f45pdcf7a6836dbd3699@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/6/05, Joe Gregorio  wrote:

> > Already covered by profile URIs.
> >
> > See http://gmpg.org/xmdp/
>
> Yes, but that doesn't cover the case when there is no  element,
> for example
> when transporting xhtml around via Atom.

Wouldn't it be possible to specify atom:content
type="application/xhtml+xml" and insert a headed document?

But I do think a mechanism for identifying any microformats in use in
a doc fragment would be very useful, I'm sure plenty of headless
content will be passed around in syndication. A way of disambiguating
the data is very desirable.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Thu Oct  6 14:23:48 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Thu Oct  6 14:23:53 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Education
In-Reply-To: <4344344F.9040801@blogmatrix.com>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>
	<4344344F.9040801@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <547EFFE5-C42B-4E3C-9318-8D679DEF32DA@opendarwin.org>

Hi David,

On Oct 5, 2005, at 1:15 PM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
> Microformats are for codifying commonly used information-rich HTML  
> content in such a way that semantic meaning can be machine extracted.

These are great quotes.  I've added them to the  page.  Feel free to hack further.

== What are Microformats? ==

Microformats are the "dictionaries" of XHTML semantic content.  They  
are for codifying commonly used information-rich HTML content in such  
a way that semantic meaning can be machine extracted.  In short, they  
are the easiest-possible way to design data (or data formats)  
intended for reuse on the web.

------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From drernie at opendarwin.org  Thu Oct  6 14:35:59 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Thu Oct  6 14:36:03 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Result set: thoughts and ideas?
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: 

Hi Dimitri,

Thanks for diving in on this!  This sounds related to the new table  
discussion I'm starting:

http://microformats.org/wiki/table-examples

I think you may want to split up your idea into two parts:
- a table of results
- the list of result pages

That latter might also be used for a "1 of 3" notice, a la S5.   The  
former, interestingly, implies a connection between XOXO-lists and  
tables, as both have the meaningful concept of "20-40 of 100".

-- Ernie P.

On Oct 6, 2005, at 11:25 AM, Dimitri Glazkov wrote:

> Ok, this is not a microformat proposal. It could probably qualify as a
> use case, but it hasn't been in public use yet. I just wanted to bring
> this in front of the list for comments, suggestions, and name-calling.
>
> The project that I am currently working on calls for a wide variety of
> tabular/list data (result sets) being displayed. The content is fairly
> diverse (from tabular document collections to lists of calendar
> events), with the only commonality being such that the consumer of
> this data needs some way to query and manipulate data (view N results
> at a time, starting from Mth result, search, sort, filter, hide/show
> columns, add rows, delete rows, etc.)
>
> I decided to encapsulate this common need into some sort of a
> consistent markup representation, so that any set, regardless of
> content, could be queried and manipulated using the same set of
> controls. As a big believer in unobrtusive scripting, I thought that
> this consistent markup would allow the same script to bind to any
> result set to provide advanced UI/UX.
>
> The work is still very much in progress, but I wanted the smart folk
> to take a look at it and provide some insight as to whether I am a
> crazy nut of some sort.
>
> Consider this example: http://glazkov.com/Resources/Code/Grid/ 
> Grid.aspx
>
> Of particular interest is the form at the top of the table, which
> provides controls for two operations:
>
> * Ranging -- defining a range of results to return
> * Sorting -- sorting result set by a specified facet (table column in
> this example)
>
> There are other query operations possible, but let's not muddy the
> waters for now.
>
> This form can already be used to build fairly complicated queries
> (show 10 items starting from 34th, sorted by size), while keeping the
> controls completely context-agnostic. The only thing that needs to be
> known is the format in which these controls are represented.
>
> Take a look at the contents of ".xlist .range" element. They provide
> information on:
>
> * total number of items in the result set
> * current starting item in the set and what query string parameter to
> use to request another starting item
> * current number of items displayed and a way to request another
> number of items.
>
> So, for instance, if the data is the archive of all blog posts, you
> have a tool that allows you to query your blog data in pretty much any
> shape or fashion.
>
> The markup-only UI is very primitive, but I believe it is a
> semancially correct way to document a protocol using HTML, it
> expresses the intent of the protocol most directly, and it is fully
> functional without any additional means.
>
> Speaking of additional means, here's an example of a very simplistic
> "friendlier" UI bound to this markup (Javascript):
>
> http://glazkov.com/Resources/Code/Grid/DefaultPager.aspx
>
> As you can see, we now have "Google-like" paging -- obviously, the
> markup stays the same. With a little effort, this can be expanded to
> bind more sophisticated UI, along the lines of Rico's LiveGrid
> (http://openrico.org/rico/livegrid.page). In that particular case, the
> script on this page would call the page itself to retrieve data using
> XHR -- no extra API exposure needed.
>
> Next step: implementing data manipulation, or allowing to modify data.
>
> I guess the point of the exercise is: if a consistent format exists to
> express a protocol of querying/manipulating a result set, it becomes
> possible to bind to this protocol without needing to know the context
> of the data.
>
> Thoughts? Comments? I welcome any kind of feedback, even if it's
> merciless public spanking.
>
> :DG<
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss

------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From ryan at technorati.com  Thu Oct  6 14:39:36 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Thu Oct  6 14:39:41 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510061321w2c236f45pdcf7a6836dbd3699@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com> <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>
	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>

	<3f1451f50510061307y2e7c76di8e7fb1cb980acc65@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510061321w2c236f45pdcf7a6836dbd3699@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9C254BC4-B1EC-49E3-8117-E4D9E696CE48@technorati.com>

On Oct 6, 2005, at 1:21 PM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> On 10/6/05, Joe Gregorio  wrote:
>
>>> Already covered by profile URIs.
>>>
>>> See http://gmpg.org/xmdp/
>>
>> Yes, but that doesn't cover the case when there is no  element,
>> for example
>> when transporting xhtml around via Atom.
>
> Wouldn't it be possible to specify atom:content
> type="application/xhtml+xml" and insert a headed document?
>
> But I do think a mechanism for identifying any microformats in use in
> a doc fragment would be very useful, I'm sure plenty of headless
> content will be passed around in syndication. A way of disambiguating
> the data is very desirable.

Hmm, I  haven't looked, but a good solution would be to register  
'profile' as a rel value at iana. Like I said, I haven't looked to  
see if this has already been done.

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From tantek at cs.stanford.edu  Thu Oct  6 15:09:20 2005
From: tantek at cs.stanford.edu (Tantek =?ISO-8859-1?B?xw==?=elik)
Date: Thu Oct  6 15:10:14 2005
Subject: [admin] Re: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of
	microformats with XHTML
In-Reply-To: <9C254BC4-B1EC-49E3-8117-E4D9E696CE48@technorati.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/6/05 2:39 PM, "Ryan King"  wrote:

> On Oct 6, 2005, at 1:21 PM, Danny Ayers wrote:
>> On 10/6/05, Joe Gregorio  wrote:
>> 
>>>> Already covered by profile URIs.
>>>> 
>>>> See http://gmpg.org/xmdp/
>>> 
>>> Yes, but that doesn't cover the case when there is no  element,
>>> for example
>>> when transporting xhtml around via Atom.
>> 
>> Wouldn't it be possible to specify atom:content
>> type="application/xhtml+xml" and insert a headed document?
>> 
>> But I do think a mechanism for identifying any microformats in use in
>> a doc fragment would be very useful, I'm sure plenty of headless
>> content will be passed around in syndication. A way of disambiguating
>> the data is very desirable.
> 
> Hmm, I  haven't looked, but a good solution would be to register
> 'profile' as a rel value at iana. Like I said, I haven't looked to
> see if this has already been done.

Ok, I'll try this again.

These are ALL great points!

I agree that it would be ideal to have a way of lessly declaring the
formal vocabularies of microformats in use.

Like I said:

On 10/6/05 10:04 AM, "Tantek ?elik"  wrote:

> I still have about 100 emails regarding that topic to digest and
> attempt to summarize, so don't worry, I haven't forgotten about them.  For
> any additional discussion on rel="profile", I would ask that folks check the
> archives to see what has already been said, and hold off for a bit in the
> hopes I can get that summary/conclusions written up which will hopefully
> answer a bunch of questions.

Thus let's consider this thread closed for the moment until I've had the
chance to do what I said above.  Otherwise we're in for a lot more repeated
circular discussion of the topic.

If anyone else wishes to actually help with the work (i.e. unbottleneck me)
of documenting the issues raised and possible/proposed solutions, please
consider doing so NOT on this mailing list (we've already had so much email
on this topic that people are now repeating the same things over and over
which is not effective use of the list), but instead, start a page on the
wiki.  There are some loosely written thoughts written about XMDP issues/FAQ
on the wiki right now, so feel free to clean that up or add to it, or start
additional more specific pages.

Also, since *so much* has been written on this topic on the email list, part
of the point here is distillation, so consider starting *very* simple with
key high level points.  Don't just cut and paste from the email archives.
Less text is better.  As I make progress on this myself, I'll add/prune
stuff on the wiki.

Thanks,

Tantek

From ryan at technorati.com  Thu Oct  6 16:18:29 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Thu Oct  6 16:22:42 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] [Microformats-announce] Web 2.0 MicroFormats
	BoF
Message-ID: 

Sorry for the late-ish notice, but there's a Web 2.0 Microformats BoF  
happening tonight.

http://web2con.socialtext.net/web2con2005/index.cgi? 
birds_of_a_feather_discussion_groups#bof_7_microformats

Details:

Chaat Cafe 
320 Third St.
(415) 979-9946
Cross Street: Folsom Street

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

_______________________________________________
Microformats-announce mailing list
Microformats-announce@microformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-announce
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Thu Oct  6 17:25:24 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Thu Oct  6 17:25:27 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] forms-examples - Microformats
Message-ID: <6A268630-EE96-44B6-A652-0CA84A5BAED6@opendarwin.org>

Here's another one:

http://microformats.org/wiki/forms-examples

I guess I have too much time on my hand during these Web 2.0  
sessions. :-)

-- Ernie P.

------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com  Thu Oct  6 18:15:22 2005
From: dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com (Dimitri Glazkov)
Date: Thu Oct  6 18:15:26 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Result set: thoughts and ideas?
In-Reply-To: 
References: 

Message-ID: 

On 10/6/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> Hi Dimitri,
>
> Thanks for diving in on this!  This sounds related to the new table
> discussion I'm starting:
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/table-examples

Yes, I think it is related, but can't seem to wrap my head about
exactly how it fits there.

> I think you may want to split up your idea into two parts:
> - a table of results
> - the list of result pages
>
> That latter might also be used for a "1 of 3" notice, a la S5.   The
> former, interestingly, implies a connection between XOXO-lists and
> tables, as both have the meaningful concept of "20-40 of 100".

Well, I thought about this, and realized that the "paged" grouping of
a result set is usually (most likely) an artificial split, driven not
by data semantics, but rather UI decisions. So, I decided against
buliding paging in -- as Rico's LiveGrid shows us, "there is no
paging" :)

So a list of result pages may or may not exist -- that decision is up
to the UA or the script that represents it.

Does this make any sense?

:DG<
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Fri Oct  7 02:35:05 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Fri Oct  7 02:35:10 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: 
References: 	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>	<43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>

Message-ID: <43464149.4000102@blogmatrix.com>

Ryan King wrote:
> On Oct 6, 2005, at 8:23 AM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
> 
>> This is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for the last  
>> two months, so I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.
>>
>> Would it be a good [bad/indifferent] idea to require declaration in  
>> the XHTML header that certain microformats are in use? The positive  
>> points I see from this are
> 
> 
> Already covered by profile URIs.
> 
> See http://gmpg.org/xmdp/
> 
> -ryan

OK, this is not quite what I was getting at (unless I'm missing 
something in there):

"XHTML pages that use microformats [X] link to the appropriate XMDP profile"

What should the value of [X] be? In the spirit of RFC language, choose 
from MUST, SHOULD or MAY.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Fri Oct  7 02:37:21 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Fri Oct  7 02:37:26 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Education
In-Reply-To: <547EFFE5-C42B-4E3C-9318-8D679DEF32DA@opendarwin.org>
References: 	<868D9804-5FA3-40FD-AD43-9D66E95C7908@technorati.com>		<9CB9D904-AC4D-4E32-BA36-B9CD9EF6A5D3@technorati.com>	<50416.63.193.123.50.1128465645.squirrel@mail.ctyme.com>	<5E79E998-BC0C-416E-9864-3511A3269952@technorati.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>		<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>	<68fba5c50510050832v5704477boe02b8083b168a1aa@mail.gmail.com>	<4344344F.9040801@blogmatrix.com>
	<547EFFE5-C42B-4E3C-9318-8D679DEF32DA@opendarwin.org>
Message-ID: <434641D1.2060101@blogmatrix.com>

Wow, thanks Ernie. I spent an afternoon (well, parts of it) trying to 
come up with an explanation about what we're on about; you got the best 
two of them in there.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> On Oct 5, 2005, at 1:15 PM, David Janes -- BlogMatrix wrote:
> 
>> Microformats are for codifying commonly used information-rich HTML  
>> content in such a way that semantic meaning can be machine extracted.
> 
> 
> These are great quotes.  I've added them to the  microformats.org/wiki/introduction> page.  Feel free to hack further.
> 
> == What are Microformats? ==
> 
> Microformats are the "dictionaries" of XHTML semantic content.  They  
> are for codifying commonly used information-rich HTML content in such  a 
> way that semantic meaning can be machine extracted.  In short, they  are 
> the easiest-possible way to design data (or data formats)  intended for 
> reuse on the web.
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Fri Oct  7 02:47:13 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Fri Oct  7 02:47:16 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: <43464149.4000102@blogmatrix.com>
References: 
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>
	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com> <43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>
	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>

	<43464149.4000102@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510070247r6fc2742nce04b65713e5ea0a@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/7/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:

> "XHTML pages that use microformats [X] link to the appropriate XMDP profile"
>
> What should the value of [X] be? In the spirit of RFC language, choose
> from MUST, SHOULD or MAY.

I'd split it into 2 parts:
* XHTML pages that use microformats MUST refer to the URI of the
microformat profile
* there SHOULD be a XMPD representation of the XMPD profile on the Web
at the URI

I would say MUST for the first, as otherwise there's no reliable way
of telling a XHTML page contains microformat data. Scraping is soo Web
1.0 ;-) However an XMPD profile isn't strictly necessary for data
extraction to take place, but is very desirable.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Fri Oct  7 02:57:54 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Fri Oct  7 02:57:57 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510070257r78cee397m9111ae8c934f8f4b@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/6/05, Ryan King  wrote:
> On Oct 5, 2005, at 2:38 PM, Mark Pilgrim wrote:
> >
> > Or, for example, a major search engine providing an interface to
> > search for content that meets a certain set of license criteria.
> >
> > http://search.yahoo.com/cc
>
> And, rumor has it, they use http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag,
> ignoring the RDF.

It isn't using rel-tag either, because all the data's hidden in comments.

The current approach to CC is really ugly (as is trackback
RDF/XML-in-comments), it's unfortunate microformats (+GRDDL) weren't
around when they started the design.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Fri Oct  7 03:01:02 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Fri Oct  7 03:01:08 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Declaring the use of microformats with
	XHTML
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510070247r6fc2742nce04b65713e5ea0a@mail.gmail.com>
References: 	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>
	<43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>		<43464149.4000102@blogmatrix.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510070247r6fc2742nce04b65713e5ea0a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4346475E.3070301@blogmatrix.com>

I just saw Tantek's note, so I'll defer further discussion until he gets 
the Wiki stuff done. For the record, I agree with you, with some caveats 
  which I'll bring up later.

I actually came up with a use for the phrase 'nanoformat' (or 
'picoformat', if we really want to be cute) yesterday. Trivial (in the 
non-derogatory sense of the word) microformats could be called 
nanoformats -- for example, rel-tag [1]. Nanoformats would not need to 
be declared.

I'll be quiet now :-)

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag

Danny Ayers wrote:
> On 10/7/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix  wrote:
> 
> 
>>"XHTML pages that use microformats [X] link to the appropriate XMDP profile"
>>
>>What should the value of [X] be? In the spirit of RFC language, choose
>>from MUST, SHOULD or MAY.
> 
> 
> I'd split it into 2 parts:
> * XHTML pages that use microformats MUST refer to the URI of the
> microformat profile
> * there SHOULD be a XMPD representation of the XMPD profile on the Web
> at the URI
> 
> I would say MUST for the first, as otherwise there's no reliable way
> of telling a XHTML page contains microformat data. Scraping is soo Web
> 1.0 ;-) However an XMPD profile isn't strictly necessary for data
> extraction to take place, but is very desirable.
> 
> Cheers,
> Danny.
> 
> 
> 
> --
> 
> http://dannyayers.com
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
> 
> 

From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Fri Oct  7 03:14:10 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Fri Oct  7 03:14:14 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Wiki suggestions
In-Reply-To: <4346475E.3070301@blogmatrix.com>
References: 	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>	<43444C78.6050709@gmail.com>	<43444FD4.30208@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510060552o77342fabl9ced7b757cfa655a@mail.gmail.com>	<4345246A.4060104@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510060723u4b709133od9fc8059bd9cf82f@mail.gmail.com>	<43454189.2020807@blogmatrix.com>		<43464149.4000102@blogmatrix.com>	<1f2ed5cd0510070247r6fc2742nce04b65713e5ea0a@mail.gmail.com>
	<4346475E.3070301@blogmatrix.com>
Message-ID: <43464A72.2080506@blogmatrix.com>

A few suggestions for the Wiki. These are administrator level type things:

(1)
there should be a link on the main page [1] that points to the real 
microformat list/wiki main page [2] instead of/in addition to the "what 
are microformats" page [3]

(2)
Require login to make changes. This is not because I'm an evil soul 
crushing controlling b*stard, but because it makes it easier to see 
who's doing what!

(3)
The navigation section of the Wiki (the upper left hand corner) should 
point to the microformats main page [1] and possibly the discussion 
archives [4]. The archives give use URIs from which we can reference in 
the Wiki for debate purposes

(4)
This is a slightly different topic, but I don't see anything in the 
process [5] to move microformats out of the Draft stage. In particular, 
I'm thinking about 'xfolk' [6] here, but you know, in general.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://microformats.org/
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page
[3] http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats
[4] http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/
[5] http://microformats.org/wiki/process
[6] http://microformats.org/wiki/xfolk
From tantek at cs.stanford.edu  Fri Oct  7 06:45:16 2005
From: tantek at cs.stanford.edu (Tantek =?ISO-8859-1?B?xw==?=elik)
Date: Fri Oct  7 06:45:20 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510070257r78cee397m9111ae8c934f8f4b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/7/05 2:57 AM, "Danny Ayers"  wrote:

> On 10/6/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>> On Oct 5, 2005, at 2:38 PM, Mark Pilgrim wrote:
>>> 
>>> Or, for example, a major search engine providing an interface to
>>> search for content that meets a certain set of license criteria.
>>> 
>>> http://search.yahoo.com/cc
>> 
>> And, rumor has it, they use http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag,
>> ignoring the RDF.
> 
> It isn't using rel-tag either, because all the data's hidden in comments.

I think he meant to say that Yahoo CC search is using rel-license (not
rel-tag).

> The current approach to CC is really ugly (as is trackback
> RDF/XML-in-comments), it's unfortunate microformats (+GRDDL) weren't
> around when they started the design.

Indeed.  I've also heard people say similar things about how it's
unfortunate that microformats weren't around when OPML was first proposed
(or even RSS).

Fortunately it looks like David Janes is doing a good job with reusing Atom
1:1 in various straw proposals on the blog-post-brainstorming page.

Thanks,

Tantek

From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Fri Oct  7 06:50:51 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Fri Oct  7 07:25:24 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds
	->	microformats
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <43467D3B.3080602@blogmatrix.com>

Which I'll have a lot more about next week, including something of a 
proposal and requests for more input from the community about some 
sticky issues.

At this point, I'd like to tip my hat to the "process" of making 
microformats; the actual step-by-step process of finding examples, 
analyzing them and classifying them has uncovered issues that I didn't 
even really imagine existing 8 weeks ago.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

Tantek ?elik wrote:
> Fortunately it looks like David Janes is doing a good job with reusing Atom
> 1:1 in various straw proposals on the blog-post-brainstorming page.
From bud at thecommunityengine.com  Fri Oct  7 07:46:16 2005
From: bud at thecommunityengine.com (Bud Gibson)
Date: Fri Oct  7 07:46:15 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
	<14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <8F13C8AB-6FA3-4C50-96D1-0850E4C56062@thecommunityengine.com>

On Oct 3, 2005, at 18:00, Mark Pilgrim wrote:

> Eventually all of these will come together in a super-script that
> parses all available data in every page you ever browse, and publishes
> it to your own private Atom Store via the Atom API.  (This part is
> already written as well, though unreleased.)
>

I think this sounds interesting.  What I have liked of your work in  
the past is its tutorial nature (e.g., diveintogreasemonkey.org).   
It's possible to pull out parts and actually use them.  I did just  
this in some of the xFolk greasemonkey scripts I put together.

What worries me a little in the super-script notion is the question,  
"What's the use case?".  If your super-script is breakable into  
digestible little parts, then it sounds very useful (i.e., ideas are  
already forming in my mind about how to use the parts).  However, the  
notion that one script can do all you describe makes me think it may  
not be so easy to modularize.

How about something like "Dive Into Microformats with Firefox"?  This  
is the germ of a book idea that I bet you could get O'Reilly to take up.

Bud
From tantek at cs.stanford.edu  Fri Oct  7 08:00:40 2005
From: tantek at cs.stanford.edu (Tantek =?ISO-8859-1?B?xw==?=elik)
Date: Fri Oct  7 08:00:44 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
Message-ID: 

Greetings,

There have a been a whole bunch of new subscribers in the past few weeks.

I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all of you, and encourage you to send a
short introductory email.  Tell us a little about yourself, where you heard
about microformats, and what your interests are.

Welcome!

Tantek

From scott at randomchaos.com  Fri Oct  7 08:24:52 2005
From: scott at randomchaos.com (Scott Reynen)
Date: Fri Oct  7 08:25:03 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <90518108-CABD-4D89-9F4D-38541AE6F1E1@randomchaos.com>

Tantek ?elik wrote:

> I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all of you, and encourage you  
> to send a
> short introductory email.  Tell us a little about yourself, where  
> you heard
> about microformats, and what your interests are.

I just joined this morning after seeing Mark's Greasemonkey/Atom post  
on del.icio.us/popular.  I have a background in scraping sites for  
useful data.  A while back I did this with job search sites to  
produce syndication feeds of results.  Recently I made an OSX  
dashboard widget to scrape and graph numbers from websites:

http://www.randomchaos.com/software/dashboard/graphite/

And I scrape together a feed of pretty much any site I view regularly  
that doesn't have one.  I'm generally interested in making existing  
data more useful, and microformats seems like one good way to do this.

Peace,
Scott Reynen
From ryan at technorati.com  Fri Oct  7 09:24:41 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Fri Oct  7 09:24:46 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds ->
	microformats
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510070257r78cee397m9111ae8c934f8f4b@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<1f2ed5cd0510050253s41a7f578o23f7f051b89c1a62@mail.gmail.com>
	<72E18278-AA65-4505-B898-41B06348F69F@opendarwin.org>

	<14be96d30510050746j2ae8387p31a7d9c6894a0e57@mail.gmail.com>
	<1f2ed5cd0510051102j469be7e1n176435624845fb84@mail.gmail.com>
	<14be96d30510051206m13349b0fq76e1345dc05b89f@mail.gmail.com>
	<434442C6.5030902@blogmatrix.com>
	<14be96d30510051438had93107p676c125d6208bffa@mail.gmail.com>

	<1f2ed5cd0510070257r78cee397m9111ae8c934f8f4b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4DD76A0E-D791-491E-9669-9C02C741659F@technorati.com>

On Oct 7, 2005, at 2:57 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> On 10/6/05, Ryan King  wrote:
>> On Oct 5, 2005, at 2:38 PM, Mark Pilgrim wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Or, for example, a major search engine providing an interface to
>>> search for content that meets a certain set of license criteria.
>>>
>>> http://search.yahoo.com/cc
>>>
>>
>> And, rumor has it, they use http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag,
>> ignoring the RDF.

/me meant http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license

-ryan

> It isn't using rel-tag either, because all the data's hidden in  
> comments.
>
> The current approach to CC is really ugly (as is trackback
> RDF/XML-in-comments), it's unfortunate microformats (+GRDDL) weren't
> around when they started the design.
>
> Cheers,
> Danny.
>
> --
>
> http://dannyayers.com
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From bryce.fields at gmail.com  Fri Oct  7 10:02:23 2005
From: bryce.fields at gmail.com (Bryce Fields)
Date: Fri Oct  7 10:02:26 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <4000d8ad0510071002k4f4b43ccsb90909f77ffd9eb5@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/7/05, Tantek ?elik  wrote:

> I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all of you, and encourage you to send a
> short introductory email.  Tell us a little about yourself, where you heard
> about microformats, and what your interests are.

Greetings everyone.  My day job is to bring standards and
accessibility to the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education's
family of web sites (an uphill and difficult, but worthy battle).  My
interests in microformats are 1) mostly to educate myself on this new
and exciting concept, 2) to see if I can discover ways to adapt
microformats to our sites as we rebuild, and 3) I'm one of those geeks
that loves chasing after those shiny and new cutting edge approaches
to how we share information on the web.

I'll mostly lurk until I think I've learned enough to offer my two
cents, at which time you may groan and wish I'd just go back to
lurking. :-)

--
Bryce Fields, Webmaster
Where I Work: Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education
Where I Play: www.royalrodent.com

"Do or do not! There is no try!" -- Yoda
From supercanadian at gmail.com  Fri Oct  7 11:20:07 2005
From: supercanadian at gmail.com (Charles Iliya Krempeaux)
Date: Fri Oct  7 11:20:12 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <84ce626f0510071120s18378229yb644afe6828da8f@mail.gmail.com>

Hello Everyone,

My name is Charles Iliya Krempeaux.  I wasn't planning to posting to
the mailing list yet.  (Didn't feel my microformat proposal was ready
yet.)  But given Tantek's post, here I am.

Like I said, I wasn't planning on introducing the list to this yet
given the instuctions here  but
if I didn't, I really wouldn't have much to say :-) so... I wrote:

  Microformats Proposal for Reputation and Trust Metrics
  http://changelog.ca/log/2005/09/12/proposed-microformats-for-reputation-and-trust-metrics

I have in the works some case studies; applying these proposed
microformats to Advogato.org, Wikipedia, and del.icio.us.  And how a
web crawler would get "use" them.  I also have plans for writing up
case study articles for "auctioning sites", "dating sites", as well as
stuff relating to IPradio/podcasting and IPTV, all using these
proposed microformats.  (I actually wanted to have these articles
written first before posting anything here.)

Outside of Microformats, my biggest interest right now revolves around
IPTV.  Most of my for-pay work is in the online advertising field. 
You've probably come across software I've written.  (If you hate
online ads, I'm sorry :-)  )

See ya

On 10/7/05, Tantek ?elik  wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> There have a been a whole bunch of new subscribers in the past few weeks.
>
> I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all of you, and encourage you to send a
> short introductory email.  Tell us a little about yourself, where you heard
> about microformats, and what your interests are.
>
> Welcome!
>
> Tantek
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>

--
     Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.

     charles @ reptile.ca
     supercanadian @ gmail.com

     developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
___________________________________________________________________________
 Never forget where you came from
From kevin at lawver.net  Fri Oct  7 11:28:45 2005
From: kevin at lawver.net (Kevin Lawver)
Date: Fri Oct  7 11:28:50 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Hi, I'm Kevin,
	and I'm Addicted To Microformats
Message-ID: <4346BE5D.7030206@lawver.net>

My name is Kevin Lawver, and I work for AOL.  I heard about Microformats 
from Tantek at SXSW 2003, and thought they were a good idea, and even 
added have an XFN sticker on my Powerbook.

My personal interest in microformats stems from my general laziness and 
love of conformity.  I don't want to have to think about how to mark 
something up all the time.  I think Microformats can go a long way 
towards standardizing how we mark up particular pieces of data that will 
allow me to spend more time watching reality TV.

Seriously, I work at a company that has a huge collection of developers 
spread all over the world.  If I can tell all of them, "Hey, you should 
mark a review or search result or list of blog posts this way, and 
heres' the documentation," they'll be more likely to do that, and we'll 
have an easier time maintaining and "discovering" that content.  It's 
why I pushed XHTML here, because we no longer had to argue about 
uppercase tags or quoted attributes.  It was decided for us.  I'd love 
to be able to use microformats to push that a little farther (and it 
means I can write more compact and more readable CSS, which is a good 
thing).

Cheers,
Kevin Lawver
http://lawver.net
From iand at internetalchemy.org  Fri Oct  7 11:31:20 2005
From: iand at internetalchemy.org (Ian Davis)
Date: Fri Oct  7 11:31:21 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <4346BEF8.9000800@internetalchemy.org>

Hi all,

I was at the BOF at Chaat last night - thanks for organising it. Great 
to see and meet some of you in person!

I joined the list a little while ago to find out more about what I'm 
missing. Learnt a whole deal about the value of being respectful of 
existing idioms and of being explicit and visible.

My background is as pragmatic semweb hacker and I think there are a lot 
of similarities in the core principles of microformats and the semweb. 
I'm keen to explore the cross-over points and I recently proposed a 
workshop for WWW2006 to explore this:

"The Semantic Web has for a long time been the domain of theorists and
researchers. In recent years applications based on the core Semantic Web
principles of machine readable data, decentralisation and semantic
interoperability have started to emerge. These applications are
providing practical experimental results that could be of great value in
validating the foundations of the Semantic Web. However many of these
applications are eschewing the proposed stack in favour of simpler but
less expressive formats and protocols. This workshop aims to provide a
forum in which to discuss and analyse the motivations behind these
practices and to examine what lessons the theorists and practitioners
can learn from one another's experiences."

It's too early to know whether this proposal will be accepted but if it 
is I'd like to invite all microformateers to participate if you are able.

Looking forward to continuing my learning here.

Ian
-- 
http://internetalchemy.org | http://purl.org/NET/iand
Working on... Silkworm 
From marniewebb at gmail.com  Fri Oct  7 11:31:39 2005
From: marniewebb at gmail.com (Marnie Webb)
Date: Fri Oct  7 11:31:42 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: <84ce626f0510071120s18378229yb644afe6828da8f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<84ce626f0510071120s18378229yb644afe6828da8f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <7a5f06eb0510071131o77f3e35ai1965156f2a533e7a@mail.gmail.com>

Hello all,

I suspect that I'll be lurking.  I know little about Microformats
except the two sentence description.

My name is Marnie Webb. I work for a nonprofit that provides
technology assistance to other nonprofits (http://www.techsoup.org). 
I'm interested in understanding how microformats can be used by
nonprofits so that they can make themselves more available to their
constituents and donors.  hCalendar seems like a natural -- make it
easy to subscribe to the events a nonprofit may host.  But what else?

Looking forward to reading along and (eventually) contributing.

:mw

---------
Marnie Webb
weblog: http://ext337.org
skype: extension337
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Fri Oct  7 12:05:09 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Fri Oct  7 12:05:11 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Hi, I'm Kevin,
	and I'm Addicted To Microformats
In-Reply-To: <4346BE5D.7030206@lawver.net>
References: <4346BE5D.7030206@lawver.net>
Message-ID: 

Well said, Kevin!  We should start a testimonial page, as I think  
these stories are useful for newcomers.

Okay, I guess I should just do it:

http://microformats.org/wiki/testimonials

I've added Kevin's; feel free to add your own!

-- Ernie P.

On Oct 7, 2005, at 11:28 AM, Kevin Lawver wrote:

> My name is Kevin Lawver, and I work for AOL.  I heard about  
> Microformats from Tantek at SXSW 2003, and thought they were a good  
> idea, and even added have an XFN sticker on my Powerbook.
>
> My personal interest in microformats stems from my general laziness  
> and love of conformity.  I don't want to have to think about how to  
> mark something up all the time.  I think Microformats can go a long  
> way towards standardizing how we mark up particular pieces of data  
> that will allow me to spend more time watching reality TV.
>
> Seriously, I work at a company that has a huge collection of  
> developers spread all over the world.  If I can tell all of them,  
> "Hey, you should mark a review or search result or list of blog  
> posts this way, and heres' the documentation," they'll be more  
> likely to do that, and we'll have an easier time maintaining and  
> "discovering" that content.  It's why I pushed XHTML here, because  
> we no longer had to argue about uppercase tags or quoted  
> attributes.  It was decided for us.  I'd love to be able to use  
> microformats to push that a little farther (and it means I can  
> write more compact and more readable CSS, which is a good thing).
>
> Cheers,
> Kevin Lawver
> http://lawver.net
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss

------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From tantek at cs.stanford.edu  Fri Oct  7 12:25:03 2005
From: tantek at cs.stanford.edu (Tantek =?ISO-8859-1?B?xw==?=elik)
Date: Fri Oct  7 12:25:06 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: <7a5f06eb0510071131o77f3e35ai1965156f2a533e7a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: 

On 10/7/05 11:31 AM, "Marnie Webb"  wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I suspect that I'll be lurking.  I know little about Microformats
> except the two sentence description.
> 
> My name is Marnie Webb.

Welcome Marnie!

> I work for a nonprofit that provides
> technology assistance to other nonprofits (http://www.techsoup.org).
> I'm interested in understanding how microformats can be used by
> nonprofits so that they can make themselves more available to their
> constituents and donors.  hCalendar seems like a natural -- make it
> easy to subscribe to the events a nonprofit may host.  But what else?

Great question.

I think this is a great example of how the microformats principles can be
applied not just to the development of microformats themselves but perhaps
to their use and application as well.

Thus the answer is: start simple.  Perhaps start with just adopting the
*most obvious* microformats for the purposes *you* think will be most
valuable/useful to your site.

I think you'll find that as you add support for some, you'll discover what
makes the most sense to add next.  And if you don't think of anything to add
next that's ok too.  Nothing wrong with adding support for a few
microformats, and then declaring victory until another need/opportunity
presents itself.

Thanks,

Tantek

From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Fri Oct  7 12:38:52 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Fri Oct  7 12:38:56 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: <84ce626f0510071120s18378229yb644afe6828da8f@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<84ce626f0510071120s18378229yb644afe6828da8f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510071238u678bf9fbga7205b077f63c7cb@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/7/05, Charles Iliya Krempeaux  wrote:

Hi Charles,

>   Microformats Proposal for Reputation and Trust Metrics
>   http://changelog.ca/log/2005/09/12/proposed-microformats-for-reputation-and-trust-metrics

Sounds interesting/useful. There's related material around:

http://trust.mindswap.org/

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/trust/11.2/d11.2_trust_vocabularies.html

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From drernie at opendarwin.org  Fri Oct  7 14:36:57 2005
From: drernie at opendarwin.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar)
Date: Fri Oct  7 14:37:06 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] STRUM: Scripts, REST & Microformats
Message-ID: <0A93F398-39C6-4250-A801-3CA3F55F1B9A@opendarwin.org>

Hi all,

We've had a very interesting week here at Web 2.0.   Last night at  
the Microformats BOF I introduced a new technology I call STRUM:

http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/C395201355/E20051006235324/index.html

.STRUM: SCRIPT-TUNNELING REST USING MICROFORMATS
> ".STRUM" is a way to easily do XHTML-RPC via REST URIs
> by providing a trivial mapping between scripting languages,
> XOXO lists, and XHTML forms/anchors.

http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/STRUM-20051005.html

I like to describe this as the thing Kevin has been working on for a  
long time, only he didn't know what it was. :-) We've often discussed  
how REST and Microformats share the same design principles.  STRUM is  
basically adding a very small amount of additional convention to tie  
the two together (and to scripts), providing an extremely lightweight  
architecture for building web services -- in a shareable and reusable  
way.

The presentation is still a bit rough, so I apologize for any  
confusion; hopefully your questions will help me clarify my thinking  
and presentation.  Special thanks to both Kevin Marks and Ryan King  
for their help and encouragement (as well as Rohit, who inspired the  
whole thing in the first place).

-- Ernie P.
------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/

From craig.ogg at gmail.com  Fri Oct  7 15:09:05 2005
From: craig.ogg at gmail.com (Craig Ogg)
Date: Fri Oct  7 15:09:08 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: 
References: <7a5f06eb0510071131o77f3e35ai1965156f2a533e7a@mail.gmail.com>

Message-ID: <8b18dc20510071509h5c1ea54icf1d13fff050e113@mail.gmail.com>

Hello,

My name is Craig Ogg.  I am co-founder of social software startup in
LA, previously VP of R&D at Stamps.com.  I have been just lurking
because my interest is mostly historical.  I previously founded a
startup back when "pen computing" and SGML were kings (early 90s) that
used reference works (dictionaries, atlases, etc.) installed on your
machine to enhance whatever text you were reading.  In part, we were
leveraging the work of the Text Encoding Initiative
(http://www.tei-c.org/).

I like the concept of more semantic information in documents, but I
think microformats are waiting for a killer app that matters to
content authors.  That said, the strategy of also making it useful for
CSS styling at least provides some immediate value until the killer
app(s) arrive.

Craig Ogg
http://www.softwarevoices.com
From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Fri Oct  7 15:52:57 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Fri Oct  7 15:53:01 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] STRUM: Scripts, REST & Microformats
In-Reply-To: <0A93F398-39C6-4250-A801-3CA3F55F1B9A@opendarwin.org>
References: <0A93F398-39C6-4250-A801-3CA3F55F1B9A@opendarwin.org>
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510071552t11fb5b5bt15b8ce08a8ba805a@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/7/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We've had a very interesting week here at Web 2.0.   Last night at
> the Microformats BOF I introduced a new technology I call STRUM:
>
> http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/C395201355/E20051006235324/index.html

Looks very interesting, but it really does need the presenter along
with the slides ;-)

I love: "The 0.8% solution for ad hoc web services."

What would be very helpful with grokking the idea would be examples of
the kind of messages that go over the wire. Something like the
descriptions MarkP uses here:

http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2003/10/15/dive.html

(note the Atom API 2003 bears little relation to the Atom Publishing
Protocol 2005)

One thing that looked potentially worrying was:

http[s]://host/.STRUM/com.resolver.uri/name

Is that a "well-known location"? (I had a quick search for the TAG
issue, where TimBL mentions this sort of thing breaking the Web, but I
gave up when I found:
http://adactio.com/extras/talklikeapirate/translate.php?filename=http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist
)

Another thing that isn't clear - how are HTTP methods other than GET &
POST handled?

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com
From nathan at twinsparc.com  Fri Oct  7 18:34:14 2005
From: nathan at twinsparc.com (Nathan Steiner)
Date: Fri Oct  7 18:34:55 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] welcome new subscribers!
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <4CC14FBE-DF7D-47CC-8ED0-98D716438BED@twinsparc.com>

Tantek ?elik wrote:
> I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all of you, and encourage you  
> to send a
> short introductory email.  Tell us a little about yourself, where  
> you heard
> about microformats, and what your interests are.

Hello everyone, I'm Nate Steiner co-owner of a small web design  
company twinsparc, and weblog web-graphics.com. I've already sent a  
message to the list regarding some little bbedit glossaries I made  
for microformats, but given that I apparently messed up the  
formatting for hCard on twinsparc.com (fixed now I believe), maybe  
that was a little preemptive :-)

In any case I'm just a markup monkey stuck in the purgatory between  
real designers and real programmers. I heard of Microformats from  
Eric and Tantek at SXSW 2005 and am ardently interested in the  
potentials. I've been brewing some thoughts for a weather  
microformat, but mostly just interesting in learning from all the  
posts to this list.

cheers,
Nate
From distobj at acm.org  Fri Oct  7 20:34:46 2005
From: distobj at acm.org (Mark Baker)
Date: Sat Oct  8 00:41:23 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] STRUM: Scripts, REST & Microformats
In-Reply-To: <1f2ed5cd0510071552t11fb5b5bt15b8ce08a8ba805a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <0A93F398-39C6-4250-A801-3CA3F55F1B9A@opendarwin.org>
	<1f2ed5cd0510071552t11fb5b5bt15b8ce08a8ba805a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20051008033446.GK5467@markbaker.ca>

Hey Ernie, thanks for CCing me.

I have similar concerns to Danny's, most importantly getting some more
detail, preferably in example-form.

The label "XHTML-RPC" also caught my eye, though I don't see anything
which suggests RPC is happening.

Cheers,

Mark.

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 12:52:57AM +0200, Danny Ayers wrote:
> On 10/7/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > We've had a very interesting week here at Web 2.0.   Last night at
> > the Microformats BOF I introduced a new technology I call STRUM:
> >
> > http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/C395201355/E20051006235324/index.html
> 
> Looks very interesting, but it really does need the presenter along
> with the slides ;-)
> 
> I love: "The 0.8% solution for ad hoc web services."
> 
> What would be very helpful with grokking the idea would be examples of
> the kind of messages that go over the wire. Something like the
> descriptions MarkP uses here:
> 
> http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2003/10/15/dive.html
> 
> (note the Atom API 2003 bears little relation to the Atom Publishing
> Protocol 2005)
> 
> One thing that looked potentially worrying was:
> 
> http[s]://host/.STRUM/com.resolver.uri/name
> 
> Is that a "well-known location"? (I had a quick search for the TAG
> issue, where TimBL mentions this sort of thing breaking the Web, but I
> gave up when I found:
> http://adactio.com/extras/talklikeapirate/translate.php?filename=http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist
> )
> 
> Another thing that isn't clear - how are HTTP methods other than GET &
> POST handled?
> 
> Cheers,
> Danny.
> 
> --
> 
> http://dannyayers.com

-- 
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.          http://www.markbaker.ca
Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies   http://www.coactus.com
From pilgrim at gmail.com  Sat Oct  8 07:02:40 2005
From: pilgrim at gmail.com (Mark Pilgrim)
Date: Sat Oct  8 07:02:45 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <8F13C8AB-6FA3-4C50-96D1-0850E4C56062@thecommunityengine.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
	<14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>
	<8F13C8AB-6FA3-4C50-96D1-0850E4C56062@thecommunityengine.com>
Message-ID: <14be96d30510080702g1c021680tb9d50924ba0d2be2@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/7/05, Bud Gibson  wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2005, at 18:00, Mark Pilgrim wrote:
> > Eventually all of these will come together in a super-script that
> > parses all available data in every page you ever browse, and publishes
> > it to your own private Atom Store via the Atom API.  (This part is
> > already written as well, though unreleased.)
>
> What worries me a little in the super-script notion is the question,
> "What's the use case?".  If your super-script is breakable into
> digestible little parts, then it sounds very useful (i.e., ideas are
> already forming in my mind about how to use the parts).  However, the
> notion that one script can do all you describe makes me think it may
> not be so easy to modularize.

Um, I'm releasing each of the parsers as separate scripts.  How much
easier can I make it to re-use them?

As for the use case for the super-script, well, I want a script that
does all that.  It will forever change the way I browse the web. 
Isn't that enough?

> How about something like "Dive Into Microformats with Firefox"?  This
> is the germ of a book idea that I bet you could get O'Reilly to take up.

I discussed this with Tantek at Foo Camp a few weeks ago.  We both
like the idea.  I'd like to concentrate on changing the world first,
and then maybe I'll get around to documenting how I did it.

--
Cheers,
-Mark
From luke.arno at gmail.com  Sat Oct  8 09:05:39 2005
From: luke.arno at gmail.com (Luke Arno)
Date: Sat Oct  8 09:05:43 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] STRUM: Scripts, REST & Microformats
In-Reply-To: <20051008033446.GK5467@markbaker.ca>
References: <0A93F398-39C6-4250-A801-3CA3F55F1B9A@opendarwin.org>
	<1f2ed5cd0510071552t11fb5b5bt15b8ce08a8ba805a@mail.gmail.com>
	<20051008033446.GK5467@markbaker.ca>
Message-ID: 

I third that. STRUM tutorial?

- Luke

On 10/7/05, Mark Baker  wrote:
> Hey Ernie, thanks for CCing me.
>
> I have similar concerns to Danny's, most importantly getting some more
> detail, preferably in example-form.
>
> The label "XHTML-RPC" also caught my eye, though I don't see anything
> which suggests RPC is happening.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark.
>
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 12:52:57AM +0200, Danny Ayers wrote:
> > On 10/7/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > We've had a very interesting week here at Web 2.0.   Last night at
> > > the Microformats BOF I introduced a new technology I call STRUM:
> > >
> > > http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/C395201355/E20051006235324/index.html
> >
> > Looks very interesting, but it really does need the presenter along
> > with the slides ;-)
> >
> > I love: "The 0.8% solution for ad hoc web services."
> >
> > What would be very helpful with grokking the idea would be examples of
> > the kind of messages that go over the wire. Something like the
> > descriptions MarkP uses here:
> >
> > http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2003/10/15/dive.html
> >
> > (note the Atom API 2003 bears little relation to the Atom Publishing
> > Protocol 2005)
> >
> > One thing that looked potentially worrying was:
> >
> > http[s]://host/.STRUM/com.resolver.uri/name
> >
> > Is that a "well-known location"? (I had a quick search for the TAG
> > issue, where TimBL mentions this sort of thing breaking the Web, but I
> > gave up when I found:
> > http://adactio.com/extras/talklikeapirate/translate.php?filename=http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist
> > )
> >
> > Another thing that isn't clear - how are HTTP methods other than GET &
> > POST handled?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Danny.
> >
> > --
> >
> > http://dannyayers.com
>
> --
> Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.          http://www.markbaker.ca
> Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies   http://www.coactus.com
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>
From dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com  Sat Oct  8 10:15:27 2005
From: dimitri.glazkov at gmail.com (Dimitri Glazkov)
Date: Sat Oct  8 10:15:32 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] STRUM: Scripts, REST & Microformats
In-Reply-To: <0A93F398-39C6-4250-A801-3CA3F55F1B9A@opendarwin.org>
References: <0A93F398-39C6-4250-A801-3CA3F55F1B9A@opendarwin.org>
Message-ID: 

How can you mix REST and RPC?

:DG<

On 10/7/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We've had a very interesting week here at Web 2.0.   Last night at
> the Microformats BOF I introduced a new technology I call STRUM:
>
> http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/C395201355/E20051006235324/index.html
>
> .STRUM: SCRIPT-TUNNELING REST USING MICROFORMATS
> > ".STRUM" is a way to easily do XHTML-RPC via REST URIs
> > by providing a trivial mapping between scripting languages,
> > XOXO lists, and XHTML forms/anchors.
>
> http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/STRUM-20051005.html
>
> I like to describe this as the thing Kevin has been working on for a
> long time, only he didn't know what it was. :-) We've often discussed
> how REST and Microformats share the same design principles.  STRUM is
> basically adding a very small amount of additional convention to tie
> the two together (and to scripts), providing an extremely lightweight
> architecture for building web services -- in a shareable and reusable
> way.
>
> The presentation is still a bit rough, so I apologize for any
> confusion; hopefully your questions will help me clarify my thinking
> and presentation.  Special thanks to both Kevin Marks and Ryan King
> for their help and encouragement (as well as Rohit, who inspired the
> whole thing in the first place).
>
> -- Ernie P.
> ------------
> Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. 
> Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
> Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss@microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>
From martinezluque at gmail.com  Sat Oct  8 11:14:43 2005
From: martinezluque at gmail.com (Emiliano Martinez Luque)
Date: Sat Oct  8 11:14:48 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Intelligent Agent - hCard Discovery Proof of
	concept App.
Message-ID: 

Hi everybody, I've been a little absent from this list. I want to
share a little app I wrote. It basically takes some URLs and some
search criteria and returns the hCards found on that set of URLs that
comply to the search criteria.

You can find it here:

http://www.metonymie.com/hCard_extract/app.html

and an explanation (Plus the limitations and known issues) here:

http://www.metonymie.com/hCard_extract/explanation.html

There might be some GUI issues and I have not tested it on macintosh
(If something does not work on Mac, please shout up since I don't have
access to a Mac). If your browser does not support xmlhttprequest try
this version:

http://www.metonymie.com/hCard_extract/get_hCard_st.php

It is not intended for Production use, it's a Proof of Concept app. I
have tested it with most "Examples in the Wild" from the hCard spec
and it mostly work (except eventfull, close that div!!!! :-)... ).
Hopefully it will prove how powerfull Microformats can be.

If you are not able to access the links provided, wait till tomorrow,
since I have just changed the metonymie.com DNS information.

Please send bug reports, suggestions, criticism, etc to
emluque@thethingsiwant.com
Thanks in advance.

I will be asking some questions here since I still have some doubts
regarding hCard syntax and parsing.

Emiliano Mart?nez Luque
From ryan at technorati.com  Sat Oct  8 13:44:18 2005
From: ryan at technorati.com (Ryan King)
Date: Sat Oct  8 13:44:21 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] wiki problems
Message-ID: <7F8B6590-468B-4A5E-B3D5-ABAD435A1EF8@technorati.com>

It appears that we're having a distributed wiki-attack. I can't fix  
it right now, but to minimize damage, I've turned it off completely.

If anyone who has an account on the box wants to, you can login and  
see how I've turned it off and fix it.

Thanks to David Janes for pointing this out to me (and I'm glad right  
now that my phone number is on http://theryanking.com/blog/contact/).

-ryan

--
Ryan King
ryan@technorati.com

From bud at thecommunityengine.com  Sat Oct  8 14:17:23 2005
From: bud at thecommunityengine.com (Bud Gibson)
Date: Sat Oct  8 14:17:19 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others
In-Reply-To: <14be96d30510080702g1c021680tb9d50924ba0d2be2@mail.gmail.com>
References: 
	<3f1451f50510030644t3ec13eefyd033bc6310157668@mail.gmail.com>

	<3f1451f50510031401q1aee3cfnb15ca2908537611f@mail.gmail.com>
	<43419F1B.6010800@lawver.net>
	<14be96d30510031500g5cd517d1x492b27ca0bfa0cc8@mail.gmail.com>
	<8F13C8AB-6FA3-4C50-96D1-0850E4C56062@thecommunityengine.com>
	<14be96d30510080702g1c021680tb9d50924ba0d2be2@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <488D3F1D-B119-4734-9D06-426AEDD12CE3@thecommunityengine.com>

On Oct 8, 2005, at 10:02, Mark Pilgrim wrote:

> As for the use case for the super-script, well, I want a script that
> does all that.  It will forever change the way I browse the web.
> Isn't that enough?

Of course that's enough.  I was merely expressing an opinion about  
what I would like personally, sort of nothing ventured, nothing gained.

>> How about something like "Dive Into Microformats with Firefox"?  This
>> is the germ of a book idea that I bet you could get O'Reilly to  
>> take up.
>>
>
> I discussed this with Tantek at Foo Camp a few weeks ago.  We both
> like the idea.  I'd like to concentrate on changing the world first,
> and then maybe I'll get around to documenting how I did it.

I guess this is a case of what rocks your world.

Bud
From rbach at rbach.priv.at  Sun Oct  9 05:28:01 2005
From: rbach at rbach.priv.at (Robert Bachmann)
Date: Sun Oct  9 05:26:48 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] wiki problems
In-Reply-To: <7F8B6590-468B-4A5E-B3D5-ABAD435A1EF8@technorati.com>
References: <7F8B6590-468B-4A5E-B3D5-ABAD435A1EF8@technorati.com>
Message-ID: <43490CD1.7080307@rbach.priv.at>

Ryan King wrote:
> It appears that we're having a distributed wiki-attack. I can't fix  it
> right now, but to minimize damage, I've turned it off completely.
> 

You should consider to update to Mediawiki version 1.4.11 because the
current version (1.4.2) contains some known security vulnerabilities.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

Robert
-- 
Robert Bachmann  (OpenPGP KeyID: 0x4A5CCF10)
From davidjanes at blogmatrix.com  Mon Oct 10 05:06:40 2005
From: davidjanes at blogmatrix.com (David Janes -- BlogMatrix)
Date: Mon Oct 10 05:04:43 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Design Patterns
In-Reply-To: 
References: 
Message-ID: <434A5950.9050702@blogmatrix.com>

In the spirit of the datetime-design-pattern [1], I've also added the 
class-design-pattern [2], rel-design-pattern [3] and abbr-design-pattern 
[4].

Design patterns give microformat authors a vocabulary for expressing 
their ideas consistently with what has already been done.

I by no means think I've done justice to these patterns, so feel free to 
jump in and improve.

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/datetime-design-pattern
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/class-design-pattern
[3] http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-design-pattern
[4] http://microformats.org/wiki/abbr-design-pattern

From danny.ayers at gmail.com  Mon Oct 10 08:12:33 2005
From: danny.ayers at gmail.com (Danny Ayers)
Date: Mon Oct 10 08:12:36 2005
Subject: [microformats-discuss] Profiles status
Message-ID: <1f2ed5cd0510100812j58ed258dld8d77d94b5cabe7c@mail.gmail.com>

Hi folks,

I was just contemplating a bit of machine-processing on the XMDP
profiles of the current set of formats, but the couple I checked
seemed, er, a bit unfinished - in the case of hReview, it appears to
be missing completely, not even a URI for it. I couldn't find a URI
for the hCard profile though there is a profile listing on the Wiki,
but the page is escaped, and when I tried pasting it elsewhere from
the browser I noticed there appears to be unescaped markup in the
definitions, e.g.  and

Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web

Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web

Wonderful seafood, workmanlike ambience