[uf-discuss] read/write hrmm

[Chris Messina]

Richard McManus has a good post about designing microcontent, but
makes a bit of a faux pas when he says:

"XML has largely lived up to its promise of being the data format of
choice for the Web 2.0 era. And by far the most widely deployed format
is RSS 2.0, which is a loosely structured XML dialect. Sir Tim
Berners-Lee would probably prefer that RDF, a much more rigorously
structured form of XML, were used instead. But that's another story!"

...and:

"Microformats is the generic name given to any format that builds on
XML to provide additional metadata about web objects. "

Am I wrong to think that while RSS is widely deployed, it has not
actually added to the semantic content on the web but rather only
created an alternative delivery system that in fact could have been
originally done with XHTML had the microformat concept (i.e. hAtom)
been around awhile back? And saying something like "any format that
builds on XML" seems overly generous and inaccurate, given the
rigorous review process that the standardized microformats go through.
I mean, isn't this mischaracterization dangerous without the proper
context around the process by which mF's are developed?

It just seems that he's missing a major component of the work that
we're doing, no?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microcontent_de.php

Chris