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

[Ryan King]

On Dec 7, 2006, at 12:29 PM, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> On 12/7/06, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
>
> ...
>
>> The RDF dream of having a generic parser and model has yet to win on
>> the open web. I'm more than happy to let the market decide whether
>> it's more value to have formats that are easy to publish, or those
>> that are easy to parse (I'm sure you can guess which side I'll take).
>
> Why does this need to be an either/or choice?  Why must
> ease-of-authoring trade-off generality here?

I'm not saying that it has to be, but that it appears to be so in  
practice. I've found that general purpose data formats are harder to  
author than specific ones. For example, HTML is more work than  
Markdown for the kinds of writing that Markdown allows. I tend to use  
Markdown pretty often because of that.

> ...
>
>> Also, I'm not sure how 'people not getting their pet properties' is a
>> problem specific to microformats.
>
> True. It doesn't mean it has to repeat the same mistake though. I
> would certainly hope the HTML 5 effort would be open minded about
> learning from all of the efforts in this space.

HTML 5 has profile URIs and the specification is much more clear as  
to how they are to be used (thanks to Tantek bugging Hixie about  
that). I think HTML 5's current extension methods (profiles, rel and  
class) are sufficient.

-ryan