Welcome H å kon! (and Re: [uf-discuss] book brainstorming )

[Tantek Ç elik]

Welcome Håkon!

Microformats folks, while I'm sure most of you are perhaps familiar with
Håkon's name and his work, I want to make sure you understand how momentous
it is to have Håkon working with us.

Håkon is one of the two co-inventors of CSS, and has played a very important
leadership role in the development of CSS in pretty much every way:
 1. Specifications at W3C (go dig up how long he has worked on the Web)
 2. The CSS1 Test Suite
 3. Opera's CSS implementation

Not only that, but Håkon (and his co-inventor Bert Bos) have played an
invaluable role shaping the guiding design principles of CSS as a language
and technical effort.

Many of the microformats principles are based on those CSS design
principles.  Simplicity.  Human readability.  Not using the very
programmery/geeky camelCase.  Using dashes to separate words in properties
etc.  Etc.  Having represented on the W3C CSS working group myself, I'm sure
I absorbed tons more and am unconsciously/intuitively reusing such
experience in all the work on microformats.

Our (as a community) work on microformats is definitely standing on top of a
lot of the excellent work Håkon has done for the Web.

Please join me in welcoming Håkon and thanking him for being here.


On 1/30/06 10:15 AM, "Håkon Wium Lie" <howcome at opera.com> wrote:

> Tantek was kind enough to open a book brainstorming page [1] in the
> aftermath of the boom! article [2] where the beginnings of a book
> microformat was presented.

A lot folks here on the list might be wondering, wait a minute, according to
the process, brainstorming doesn't come first, research into examples and
formats comes first.

Håkon has been working on this kind of thing (simple, usable formats etc.)
for so long (many years longer than pretty much anybody on this list, myself
included) that he has incredibly good intuition about a lot of this stuff.
His first guesses on brainstorming are going to be very good, and though
they should all be backed up with good research, we should not be dismissive
of them.  

And I'm sure that Håkon will expect that we will hold him to the same level
of standards (so to speak ;) as all other microformats efforts.

Thus I'm working with Håkon to make sure that the proper research gets done
(see below), and it will likely impact the book microformat itself.


> I have started the brainstorming by discussing some of the issues that
> have been raised: the number of class names, and the relation to
> DocBook. The goal of the work is to align the work with the uF
> process.

Thanks Håkon!

This discussion on the brainstorming page helps *a lot*.

One thing which we could use help with --


Attention microformats folks interested in representing books online!

We need more instances of and better documentation and analysis of the
book-examples:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/book-examples

I'll note that we're also fortunate to have Mark Pilgrim on the list, who
has very direct experience with publishing online versions of print books he
has written.

In addition, are there are any other well established standards for
electronic book formats besides DocBook (<cough>eBook</cough>)?

We need more of those documented as well:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/book-formats


> <threat>
> I'll register megaformats.org if you don't like it!
> </threat>

Hah!  I think you should register it anyway and perhaps use it to, ahem,
document/link to various classical/typical megaformat efforts. ;)


> [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/book-examples
> [2] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom

Thanks again for writing these up Håkon.

Tantek