[uf-discuss] Enumerating Microformats on a Page

[Scott Reynen]

On Mar 24, 2006, at 8:58 PM, Breton Slivka wrote:

> I've only just recently figured out what xmdp's are, and what  
> they're capable of.  I notice the structure of your hcard/hreview/ 
> hcalendar thing is such that you can pick an attribute, and search  
> for bits of data which contain that attribute.   Have you attempted  
> to detect and parse XMDP's not for validation, but to discover new  
> microformats not documented at microformats.org?   Now don't get me  
> wrong, I understand the importance of strong standardization, but  
> say someone creates a niche format for their own site, and related  
> sites in their community with an xmdp,   do you think your  
> aggregator could use that xmdp to create new searchable attributes  
> in your search engine?
>
> Sorry this is a bit of a tangent, but the idea of it kind of  
> fascinated me.

Generally, I think that could work, but XMDP is very limited in the  
machine-readable information it provides, so it wouldn't be much more  
useful than just cataloging all class names found. Also, there aren't  
that many microformats currently. And if there were microformats  
springing up all over the place, I think this might be better handled  
by just creating XSL transformations of each microformat to RDF.

Peace,
Scott