URI profiles [was RE: [uf-discuss] Comments from IBM/Lotusrepabout Microformats]

[Mike Schinkel]

> Without meaning to sound flippant, they should convince their 
> tool providers to support microformats. It would take some 
> effort, but blogs or CMSs or whatever can either provide 
> access to the HEAD tag or some mechanism for specifying which 
> microformats are in use and adding the required profiles into 
> the HEAD tag itself.  

That position doesn't reflect reality; it's akin to Rumsfled saying the war
was going well. It's what he wanted, but it wasn't true.

The reality is that lots of CMS are open-source, and open-source does what
they want to, when they want to. It's the nature of open source. What's
more, hosting providers often install software based on customer request;
customers can have any flavor they want as long as it's vanilla.  (Try to
get a web host to install ISAPI Rewrite on a Windows server, for example.
Apples & Oranges, but still.)

No, the person who will be hurt by that position is the content author who
can't get the CMS to change and/or doesn't have the skills to modify it
themselves. Further, the web at large will be hurt because less content will
be marked up semantically than could have been.

> When new technology is deployed, there is generally a 
> transitional phase where it takes developers to make things 
> work. Once the tools catch up, even non-techies can be a part 
> of it.  There's no real reason not to expect that 
> transitional phase to be a part of microformats' adoption.
> My understanding is many of the tools out there are already 
> working on some sort of microformats support, this is just 
> another example of it.

Then there is a need for a transitional solution.

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