[microformats-discuss] The adoption of syndication feeds -> microformats

[David Janes -- BlogMatrix]

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 at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
> 
>