[uf-discuss] "Behavior" and microformats

[Chris Messina]

Funny, I was actually discussing this with Tantek and David weekly
about how Microformats + Behavior + Wikis are the next frontier...
Here's what I sent them:

I had a brainstorm in the shower this morning (where all my good
thoughts come to me) about wikis & microformats.

Essentially it is this: wikis and tagging allow for after-the-fact,
freeform writing and categorizing. That means that you're not forced
into some programmer's frame of reference or UI to complete a task.

With wikis and microformats, we get one step closer to a Word-like
composition experience (i.e. write first, semanticize second).

So two things.

First, writing microformats should be 1. invisible. 2. useful.

Therefore, if the wiki knows about a contact, it should autocomplete a
vcard for me.

Additionally, wiki syntax for creating microformats should be simple
and consistent. This will be hard to figure out, because there isn't
much behavior available on this... however something like this might
work:

[contact]Chris Messina[/contact]
[contact][fn]Chris Messina[/fn]: [email]chris at foo.com[/email][/contact]

...or...

[contact:ChrisMessina]
[event:CoworkingMeetup]

Finally, microformatted contact needs to have a litany of behaviors
attached to them -- from right clicking behaviors to drag and drop
interaction. So that when I'm on a wiki page, I can edit a contact's
sheet/address card even if only the name is present...

In the latter two examples above, two wiki links would be created, but
instead of going to a textarea, you'd get a form to fill in based on
the microformat fields. When you hover over the original link in its
original context (or wherever else it shows up), we'd do an AJAX
lookup on the destination page and pull out the microformatted data in
a DHTML dialog w/ a link to "add to my calendar|address book".

With all these things combined, I think that the value and ease of use
would make the wiki platform ideal for pushing microformats into
normal text composition patterns.

Thoughts?



On 3/27/06, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> While reading "yet another design tutorial for Web 2.0 sties":
>
> http://snyke.net/blog/2006/03/25/site-design-using-prototype/
>
> I ran across the "Behaviour" JavaScript library:
>
> http://bennolan.com/behaviour/
> "Using CSS selectors to apply JavaScript behaviors"
>
> I'm not sure I understand it fully yet, but this seems like the
> "microformat-friendly" way to attach JavaScript to web pages.
> Anybody else looked at this?  I don't know about the library itself,
> but the resulting web pages are impressively clean...
>
> -- Ernie P.
>
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