[uf-discuss] origin of class attribute approach in microformats ?

[Sören Nils 'chucker' Kuklau]

I'll try and summarize it in a different way: as far as I'm concerned,
part of the very appeal of microformats (and part of the reason for
the "micro" prefix) is simplicity.

- As a spec writer, you don't have to come up with wholly new XML or
XML+RDF dialects
- As an author, you don't have to learn about how to deal with XML
namespaces and, generally, embedding other XML into XHTML
- Even more importantly, you don't have to deal with the massive
amount of quirks wrt/ handling XML namespaces in browsers

All you have to do is learn to use a few more classes, which virtually
every browser already supports anyway, due to their extensive use in
CSS.

And *because* you're just using HTML/XHTML classes, you can already
benefit from the way a browser treats them. You don't have to reinvent
the wheel, so to speak. A namespaced implemented would require you to
come up with styling for every single element, but using (X)HTML
classes lets you take advantage of the existing styling of (X)HTML
elements.

Hope that helps :-)