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

[Mike Schinkel]

Benjamin West wrote:
> That's the first I've heard of this usage.  I think what I'm 
> hearing (and agree with) is a need for a term that describes 
> the product of semantic markup techniques in a general way.  

It's my usage.  It seemed natural as I've heard the term uppercase/lowercase
used to distinguish between official and unofficial in other areas in the
past.

> Lots of people are already doing this, and don't need any 
> official body to bless them.

Agreed.  I just see the need to give those people a way to disambiguate
between themselves and Microformats. I've said the same here as well as on
WHATWG. But I'm not gaining any success to date. People are saying it is a
hypothetical problem while ignoring that I am saying it is an actual problem
in my usage.

> Microformats (any casing) would be a subset of these products 
> that are blessed by pervasive use across the web.  I'm 
> hesitant to pick out such a name, lest I choose badly (eg 
> AJAX).  I'm happy to let the market pick that name (eg I 
> don't think anyone should deliberately pick it out.), but at 
> the same time, I'm hesitant to let the term microformats be 
> applied to general applications of general techniques.
> 
> Does that reverberate at all with you, Mike, or anyone else?

That's exactly what I see going on here and discuss on WHATWG, so yes.  Ian
Hickson called it "Keywords in the HTML extension mechanism" and I reverted
to calling it "semantic markup embedded in HTML."  Maybe we could call it
SemMarE?  (yeah, I suck a making up names too. ;-)

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org/