[uf-discuss] Comments from IBM/Lotus rep about Microformats

[S. Sriram]

From: "Scott Reynen" <scott at randomchaos.com>
>
>> 2. Place a yadiservices discovery pointer to where parser(s)
>
> What you've described above is a process for converting all  microformats 
> to JSON, but that doesn't really solve the problem Elias  described.  It 
> just changes the format.  Each individual parser still  needs to figure 
> out what the JSON means, where before they had to  figure out what the 
> HTML means.
>

In point of fact it exactly solves elias's problem in somewhat the same way 
that
inline RDFa does. Because of the key-value pairs retuned by JSON.

Take Elias's hCard example [1] with the need for additional attributes i.e.
blog-url, activity-url etc. and the inability to 'add new
properties' to an existing microformat. In the distributed parser model, the 
returned
JSON would allow all uf-aware-browser-apps to look only for hCard data and 
allow
'uf-aware-special-browser-apps' to seek out the additional attributes i.e. 
blog-url etc.
satisfying elias's need.

In other words by looking at parsing/rendering as two seperate and distinct
steps, with ditributed parsing one can accomodate 'generic' formats and
'custom' formats and one can accomodate 'generic' rendering and 'custom'
rendering.

One could also in theory extend the YADIS service to offer a uf-rendering
service, so a browser could look at uf-authored page, send the uf-snippet to
the 'discoverd' uf2json parser, and than send the json to the discovered 
'uf-json-renderer/storer'.etc.

[1] 
http://listserver.dreamhost.com/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2006-December/008500.html

S. Sriram