[microformats-discuss] Microformats, REST, and XML

[Dimitri Glazkov]

On 9/19/05, Kevin Marks <kmarks at technorati.com> wrote:
> 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

This is actually a biggie, which is not recognized by many. Already
having a perfectly good UA and not utilizing it seems like such a
waste.

> * 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

Interesting! I was threading along the same cowpaths, it seems. Except
I think using the XML part of XHTML to parse the results is not that
bad. I wrote this sample for one of my seminars:

http://glazkov.com/Resources/Code/ContentType/

The most exciting part of all this is seeing how all this new
disparate ideas come together: REST, Microformats, and even
Unobstructive DOM Scripting with progressive enhancement (which was
one of the things my demo was showing).

:DG<