[microformats-discuss] hWidget

[Mark Rickerby]

>>> People rewrite templating in PHP because they're shortsighted and not
>>> humble enough to submit themselves to someone else's paradigm.
>>
>> Some people, definitely.
>>
> I'm sure there is plenty of shortsightedness. But by the same token,
> perhaps a little humility is needed to allow people to use their own
> paradigms rather than insisting they follow someone else's. (Not that
> I have any myself of course ;-)

Yes, and just to add something a bit more constructive than my last
comment here...

I would never want to discourage anyones individual creativity and
learning, whether they are experimenting with template syntax or
exploring the semantic possibilities of XHTML. People should not feel
like they can't try to invent (or reinvent) something for themselves.
For example, if nobody ever tried to rewrite an interpreter for Basic,
there would be a huge group of people who never progressed to a higher
level of understanding language implementation.

The problem with shortsightedness only comes when someone believes
that their way is "right", that they have a framework or a standard
which others should follow, despite them having worked alone, and
perhaps not even with real world use cases, or knowledge of overlaps
between their efforts and stuff that already exists, then assuming
that because it works in one place, it will work everywhere else.

If a paradigm is a "way of doing things", then interestingly enough,
the Microformats way actually comes much closer to Kuhn's original
definition of a paradigm, in that it is a group mediated process,
based on standards of communication that are accepted by the
particular community.

Tantek just added this to the wiki which touches on this point:
http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats#more_thoughts_on_how_microformats_are_different

Regards,
Mark