[uf-discuss] Call to action: blog related microformats: hAtom, blog-info, blog-description

[Tantek Ç elik]

1. hAtom for syndicated content

There has been tremendous progress made on hAtom thanks to everyone's
tireless efforts, in particular DavidJanes and Ryan King.  The draft is
looking pretty good, and the issues document has been cleaned up a lot.  I
encourage everyone who is interested in a microformat for publishing blog
posts to please take a look at both:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom
 http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom-issues

As there are still some non-trivial open issues, we are not done yet, but I
would like to move this forward quickly.  Please provide feedback and
suggetsions.


2. blog-description microformat

In addition to the posts, there are a lot more things on a blog, such:

* blogroll - the common case can be represented with XOXO + hCards + XFN,
and I have tried this out in my December archives, view source and take a
look: http://tantek.com/log/2005/12.html

* other related or descriptive elements like:
 * feeds and other alternates
 * the author of the blog (should just use <address> + hCard for this)
 * perhaps the geo location of the blog

I think it is worth creating a microformat to markup the information on a
blog that is about the blog itself, and I've started
blog-description-examples (based on earlier work at blog-description-format)
to work on this:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-description-examples


3. blog-info microformat

Similarly, but different, there is also the common practice of reference
blogs (from other blogs or sites), and also providing some additional
information about the blog, such as their feeds, perhaps the author etc.

While on the surface this may be very similar to a blog-description, there
are big differences in the fact that one is by the author, and the other by
someone else.  There are also big differences in what (or how much) blogs
provide about themselves, vs. what a reference to a blog, or perhaps even a
blogroll provides about the blogs in that blogroll.

The simplest case of a blogroll is handled by XOXO + hCard + XFN, but there
are enough real world examples of "richer" blogroll which include additional
info about the blogs like feeds that I believe this may be worthy of some
microformat work as well.  I have started an examples page to work on this:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-info-examples

A "blog-info" microformat may share some aspects with a "media-info"
microformat (e.g. both often link to "alternates"), and it may help us to
try to understand what they might have in common as microformats.  Then
again, maybe a blog-info microformat is as simple as the name of the blog,
the url of the blog, and one or more (optionally typed) feeds for the blog.


I'd like to make rapid progress on #2 and #3 as I believe them to be fairly
simple microformats, something we should be able to brainstorm in a day or
two at the most.


I invite everyone interested in working on blog related microformats to jump
on the #microformats IRC channel and help make progress on hAtom,
blog-description, and blog-info.


Thanks,

Tantek