[uf-discuss] Microformats vs XML

[Steven Livingstone]

I'm not wholly convinced they compete to be honest.

Xml is very easily authored as well, is supported by all browsers i believe, as well as most applications now - not sure where the redundancy comes from - you use what you want.

Xml is far better supported in terms of toolset and validation. It also has powerful technologies around it and i find it hard to know what i would use Microformats over Xml - i'd always go with Xml - unless i was embedding certain data within an XHTML document, but that's because there is now support for Microformats, not because Xml wouln't do it (remembering that XHTML and co. are Xml in any case).

Just to be clear, the "Xml communities" have been creating standards for a number of years and there has been literally hundreds of effors and many standards are in use today - commercial and non-commercial.

I'd say the cooo thing about Microformats is they are a look at something in a new way (not replacing anything as such). If anything it competes perhaps against Dublin Core/RDF when embedded in XHTML documents, however, i do believe Microformats are something entirly new (maybe an argument agsinst Smart Tags and so on could be made).

Regards,
Steven

----
Steven Livingstone
http://stevenR2.com

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Phil Haack" <haacked at gmail.com>
Reply-To: Microformats Discuss <microformats-discuss at microformats.org>
Date:  Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:35:25 -0700

>I am writing an article for an online development magazine on Microformats
>and I'm looking for some good online discussions on the benefits of
>Microformats over XML.
>
>So far I have:
>
>Reduced Redundancy (ex. RSS)
>Browser Support for Microformats since it builds on HTML.
>Ease of authorship
>
>Are there any others I am missing? Is there a good discussion you could
>point me to? I searched and didn't find a whole lot.  I may be using the
>wrong search terms. ;)
>
>Phil
>
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