[microformats-discuss] RFC: Thoughts on Video and Audio
Microformats
Charles Iliya Krempeaux
supercanadian at gmail.com
Mon Oct 17 19:32:54 PDT 2005
Hello,
On 10/17/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
[...]
> > The HTML anchor element has a urn attribute (which as far as I
> > know, no one ever really used). We can use this to bind anchors --
> > <a> tags -- together; to show that they link to the same thing.
>
> That's certainly something I've wondered about -- how to optimally
> group together alternates. The problem, though, is that this doesn't
> give any way to discriminate between the various choices, since all
> we know is that they're nominally identical..
A machine would tell the difference between the different choices with:
* the anchor "type" attribute,
* the anchor "hreflang" attribute,
* and other metadata.
A human would tell the difference with the word that is being liked
with (and any surrounding text, etc.) Or by the "title" attribute.
At the end of the my article (which I previously posted the link to) I
suggested one way in which we might attach extra metadata too. (In
addition to that though, you could add extra metadata through exta
attribute on the anchor tags, brought in through XML namespaces.)
> There's a fairly common pattern of presenting multiple
> representations of the same document, but I don't if we've settled on
> the optimal one. I'm still leaning towards something like:
>
> <ol class="pickOne">
> <li class="default"><a href="http://blah/1.mov"><abbr
> title="12812312">big (hi-res)</abbr></a></li>
> <li><a href="http://blah/2.mov"><abbr title="2812312">small (lo-res)</
> abbr></a></li>
> </ol>
First let me say that I'm not fully versed with Microformats yet; and
say again that I haven't gone through this mailing list's archive, so
this may be said out of ignorance.... but I kind of get queasy at the
idea of putting semantics into places where semantics don't belong.
Especially when there is a place where we can use, that is made to
hold semantics.
The "class" attribute and the "title" attribute imply absolutely no
semantics (as far as I know). And there could be systems (either now
or in the future) that transform HTML that break Microformats because
they relied on the "class" or "title" attributes. (Anything that
transforms HTML would need to preserve the semantics in the "urn",
"rel", and "rev" attributes.)
The "urn" attribute implies semantics. The "class" and "title" don't.
(If you look at the pseudocode at the bottom of my article, I have a
fictitious attribute called "x:value" which does what you are trying
to do with "title". For that example, I made up a new attribute
because I believed we needed a new attribute that was made to hold
semantics.)
> That is, use "pickOne" to indicate a choice, "default" to indicate
> the preferred, and abbr's "title" for a numeric size indicator
> (preferably bytes).
>
> Does that make sense? Lisa, have you found anything better?
I understand what you are trying to say, but I either don't yet
completely understand Microformats or I just disagree.
Let me try and explain my point-of-view.
The main theme behind Microformats, as I understand it, is that they
are "formats" designed for humans first and machines second. So we
these formats are in XHTML. And not just that. That they are made to
be accessible by developers and programmers with only *basic* HTML
knowledge.
That's what makes "rel" and "rev" based Microformats, like XFN,
rel-nofollow, rel-author, rel-enclosure, etc, so great. They are
simple enough so that a person with only basic HTML knowledge could
use them. And also, they put semantics into places where semantics
belong.
Another place we get semantics is from the inherent semantics of the
individual HTML elements. For example, <dl>, <dt>, and <dd> are a
definition list. <ul>, <ol>, <li>, give us a (possibly nested) list.
Etc.
Also,... the only reason I can see for requiring XHTML over HTML is
because of XML namespaces. That way you could import modules (like
you do with RSS).
So, it's from this that I wrote that article. And it is from this why
I prefer what I described in my article.
But, if I just don't "get it". And am missing something about
Microformats, please let me know.
See ya
> -- Ernie P.
>
> On Oct 17, 2005, at 2:30 PM, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > This is my first real post to this mailing list. (Although I
> > previously posted in the thread with the subject "welcome new
> > subscribers!" at
> > <http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-
> > October/001252.html>.
> > But this post doesn't have anything to do with the content of that
> > post.)
> >
> > Generally before I post to a mailing list, I usually first read as
> > much as the archive as I can so that I don't post in ignorance; and
> > don't ask questions that have been already answered. But, I've been
> > very busy the last while, and I haven't been able to do that. So I do
> > apologise for posting without doing so. And am basing what I've said
> > on what I've read on the wiki.
> >
> > I'd like to get comments on some of the Microformats I plan on using
> > in my "Internet TV" related projects (before I use them in the wild).
> >
> > Specifically, I'd like to get people's comments on the following
> > article that I wrote:
> >
> > Thoughts on Video and Audio Microformats
> > http://changelog.ca/log/2005/10/16/
> > thoughts_on_video_and_audio_microformats
> >
> > I would just include the text here, but there is alot of HTML
> > formatted text. (And I know alot of people hate HTML e-mails.) And
> > it is quite long.
> >
> > Any comments would be appreciated.
> >
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> >
> > See ya
> >
> > --
> > Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
> >
> > charles @ reptile.ca
> > supercanadian @ gmail.com
> >
> > developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
> > ______________________________________________________________________
> > _____
> > Never forget where you came from
> > _______________________________________________
> > microformats-discuss mailing list
> > microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>
> ------------
> Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. <drernie at opendarwin.org>
> Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
> Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>
--
Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
charles @ reptile.ca
supercanadian @ gmail.com
developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
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