wiki-thon? Re: [uf-discuss] Microformats.org usability review

[Carl Beeth]

On 2/2/06, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
> ...  My point was rather that it seems (at least to me)
> like there's several "potholes" that people new to microformats often
> stumble across...

One of the potholes is in my opinion the little intro text on the home page:

What are microformats
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set
of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted
standards. Learn more about microformats.

This text does not answers much if you don't know what microformats
are, the machine readable part comes across as totally secondary when
in fact it is a main point. As I see it the main objective of
microformats is to have a ultra simple way to make the things we
publish for humans more machine readable. If we are all excited about
microformats it is because we can see smarter user agents and smarter
aggregation exploiting the microformated content.

So in my opinion the message order should be:
1 Machine readable
2 Simple / Human
3 Web Pages
4 Open
5 Based on other standards (could be sacrificed to the read more)

Sadly I'm a horrible writer so I apologize for just pointing at
problems without giving solutions.

I would also consider swapping the blog column with the intro/overview
column so that the intro is the first thing visitors see. This is a
minor quibble, otherwise I think the design is brilliant.

On a side note, I just published a little thing on my site that
touches microformats, blogs and social networks, may be of interest to
some of you.
<http://www.beeth.com/articles/the_multi_dimensional_weblog.html>

Ciao
Carl