[microformats-discuss] Re: Educating Others

[Ryan King]

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 <http://ifindkarma.typepad.com/relax/2004/12/ 
microformats.html>, if you will.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com