[uf-discuss] Happy New Year! Microformats in 2006.

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Hello,

On 1/1/06, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:

[...]

> 5. Media Info.  Formerly known as media-metadata.
>
> Side-note rant: One thing we should all resolve to do in the new year is to
> strike the word "metadata" from our discussions as much as possible.  It is
> a theory/abstraction-focused word and thus frames discussions and designs
> very poorly.  Instead, let's base our discussions and designs on what users
> are actually used to, and a focus on and user centered design.  You don't
> see menu items that say "Get Metadata", you see menu items that say "Info"
> or "Get Info" or "Properties...".  Data is data.  What matters is whether
> the user cares about the information, not whether the data is meta or not.
>
> Back to media info.  It seems that nearly every smart person (and especially
> domain expert) that attempts to solve problems in the space of media info
> ends up falling into the traps of complexity and over-design.  Just look at
> the current background research.  Media info on web pages is sorely in need
> of a SIMPLE microformat which describes the 80/20 of information about a
> particular piece of media and nothing more in v1.
>
> This is perhaps the most challenging of the above 5 new microformat efforts,
> and truly requires a serious breakthrough in how we think about media from
> the *user* perspective, rather than a programmer's perspective.
>
> One hypothesis: we need actual users of media who are somewhat technically
> savvy, rather than media info domain experts (who seem to have a 100% track
> record of falling into the aforementioned complexity and over-design traps),
> to help brainstorm and model what people *really* publish about media on the
> Web.  Will that be possible?
>
> I want to see this happen.  I'm not a media info domain expert.  If I have
> to, I'll jump in myself and be draconian about the simplification.  I'm
> hoping that at least a few of the experts out there are tired of the
> complexity and over-design of previous/existing attempts (including perhaps
> the attempts by their own companies), and would at least entertain and try
> simpler approaches.  In the interest of a fresh look focused first on
> simplicity and minimalism, here is a start:
>
>  http://microformats.org/wiki/media-info-examples

So does that mean I should be un-merging the stuff I was merging in
there before?



See ya

--
    Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.

    charles @ reptile.ca
    supercanadian @ gmail.com

    developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
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