[microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others

[Ryan King]

On Oct 3, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
> 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.

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 at technorati.com