[microformats-discuss] Microformats, REST, and XML

[Kevin Marks]

Another angle on the discussions regarding XML vs XHTML, and touching 
on REST, is the context of use.

If you are using XML to pass data around between your own applications 
and never touching the web, then the extra degree of control gained by 
constructing your own arbitrary data structure in XML may be worth it.

If however, you are intending to send the data over a webserver, using 
a REST API, then using microformats in XHTML (and in particular XOXO) 
has many benefits:

* you can directly view the output of your services in a browser
* if you use XHTML fragments, you can use the simple JAH* method to 
insert them in a dynamic page without client-side 
parse/unmarshal/remarshal/generate code
* Client side manipulation is eased because you are using the DOM of 
XHTML, not an  arbitrary XML of your own design, so you can use 
existing tools in CSS and javascript.
* XOXO provides a direct 2-way mapping between complex scripting data 
structures involving nested lists and dictionaries and XHTML so you can 
omit lots of specifc marshalling/unmarshalling code

*JAH:

http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/staticjah.html