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

[S. Sriram]

From: "Mike Schinkel" <mikeschinkel at gmail.com>
> because Microformats squat on a scare resource (names in classes.)
>


This is not a scarce resource, people can (and are) naming classes as they 
choose.
Any constraint happens at the parsing stage, since microformat-aware parsers 
look
for specific class names etc. (see below)

From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello at mitre.org>
> down to an issue of interoperability.  If the Microformat's community
> splinters and, say, multiple versions of hCard are created then we
> immediately have an interoperability problem.
>

No, this is merely a rendering problem. From the microformat hCard parsing
page [1]

>forward compatible parsing
>When parsing the contents of an hCard, any unrecognized class names must be 
>ignored. >Similarly, unrecognized values for hCard properties must also be 
>ignored.

So, if  one wanted to extend hCard with additional fields i.e. blog-url,
activity-url they are free to do so. Generic
parsers/renders *will not barf* and simply discard the superset.
Specific parsers/renderes would be needed however to accomodate this.

In other words, the constraints imposed by microformats.org should not 
effect
others. They can leverage off of existing microforamtted-objects, build
their own alongwith corresponding parsers/renderes and in browsers that
only understand standard microformats, they most likely will degrade
gracefully and the subset be parseable/renderable

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing
S. Sriram