[microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others

[Scott Anderson]

On 10/3/05, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> 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.