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

Sat Dec 9 08:17:33 PST 2006

On 12/9/06, Brian Suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> wrote:

> i still think/feel that excluding embeded microformats inside other
> microformats is a bad idea. The whole point of NOT having namespaces
> is that the property values that we put into class/rel/rev have the
> same consistent meaning across all formats and therefore SHOULD be
> considered even when nested because it IS the same meaning.
>
> As it stands, hCard does NOT have any rules for other microformats to
> be nested inside of it... So if i were to do something like:
> <div class="vcard">
> <span class="fn">Brian Suda</span>
> <div class="vevent">
>   <div class="summary">My Birthday</div>
>   <abbr class="dtstart bday" title="1800-01-01">Jan 1st</abbr>
> </div>
> <div class="hFooBar">
>   <img src="images/me.png" class="photo" />
> </div>
> </div>
>
> According to the "Never look inside other microformats when parsing
> the outermost format" the "bday" value would never be picked-up by the
> hCard parser. Also, if/when hFoobar came-out, if "to be a valid parser
> you can't parse inside other formats" it would HAVE to know NOT to
> parse inside hFooBar and how would it know not to do that unless, when
> each new format is minted, all previous formats must also update? that
> doesn't make sense to do.
>
> I think that the other nested formats should be transparent and any
> parser can look inside any other format - that's why we choose
> property values that apply across the whole microformats spectrum.
>
> Does that make sense? or are we both arguing (and agreeing) about the
> same thing and just not realising it?

We're not talking about the same thing but I think the case you're
making here is pretty strong.

The issue that I've been trying to solve in my mind (and I'm sure
we're all on the same page here) is given an attribute A nested in
micrformats M, N and P (from inner to outer), is "what does A belong
to". If the answer is "all of them" then there seems to seems to be a
potential conflict "consistent meaning" and "same meaning".

Consider this nesting:

<body>
<div class="hentry">
  ...
  <div class="published">8 December 2006</div>
</div>
<div class="published">9 December 2006</div>
</body>

In this example, I'm reusing "published" to mean to "the date of
publication of a microformatted object"; in one case, a blog entry and
in the other case, the page itself. This reuses the "published" class
from hAtom to a new microformat for describing the publication date of
the page (some research has happened on this in the past). If we ask
the parser for "give me the publication date of the page", then
obviously it has the sort out which to use. We could define a whole
new class for describing the publication date of the page, but then we
have multiple classes meaning more or less the same thing.

I don't have a happy solution for this and maybe it just comes down to
"work it out case by case". However, I potentially see it to be very
useful to reuse things like "fn" in nested microformats.

I'm still happy with the BLOCKQUOTE/Q rules.

Regards, etc...
David