[microformats-discuss] Re: Educating Others

[Dougal Campbell]

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 <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/