"uid" microformats? (was Re: [uf-discuss] ISBN mark-up)

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 4/26/06 9:27 AM, "Scott Reynen" <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:

> On Apr 26, 2006, at 10:44 AM, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> 
>> Ross, if the problem you're trying to solve doesn't involve common
>> real
>> world publishing cases on the *Web*, then yes, it should be
>> dismissed as far
>> as microformats are concerned.
> 
> A large portion of what is published on the web references things
> that don't exist on the web, and thus don't have a canonical URL.

Right, and to resolve whether it is a "large portion" or not, we ask that
such things are documented in examples pages, and the citation-examples are
a good example (so to speak) of this.


> As  
> markup geeks, we all have our own URLs to represent ourselves.
> Normal people don't.  That doesn't mean normal people don't publish
> on the web.

Recognize that this is changing, and very rapidly.

With so many folks publishing their own blogs, or using social networking
services.  At this point, if you add up the stats published by the various
online profiles services, tens (hundreds?) of millions of "normal" people
have their own URLs than even a few years ago.

In a few years, you may find that normal people have their own URLs just as
normal people have their own email addresses today.


>> This is the wrong place to solve problems
>> that don't fit those constraints.
> 
> Publishing on the web is a good constraint for microformats.

Right, that's our core design center.


> Having  
> a canonical URL on the web suitable for a UID is a bad constraint for
> a microformat.

This I am not sure about.  It certainly seems like a *good thing* to provide
incentive for more UIDs to become canonical URLs on the web.

But I would agree that this shouldn't be a constraint/requirement per se,
but rather should be a bias (i.e. SHOULD) so that we provide incentive or at
least preference in the direction of more canonical URLs.


> I think there has been ample room left for
> misunderstanding over which is being advocated as a constraint.
> Clearing up this ambiguity would be more productive than repeating
> the same truisms over and over again.

Thanks for illustrating this distinction. I hope the above clears this up.


>> Voices on a mailing list don't determine the 80 vs. 20.  That's the
>> point of
>> the process.  Documented real world publishing examples on the web
>> determine
>> the 80 vs. the 20.
> 
> Right.  I think saying "80% of people do X" without pointing to the
> real world publishing examples that back up such a statement makes it
> look like voices on this mailing list are determining the 80 vs. 20.

Right.  Hopefully we only do so in "obvious" cases (e.g. things on the Web
have URLs :)

Thanks,

Tantek