[uf-discuss] Format-of-Formats?

[Breton Slivka]

I mostly agree with tantek, but I would like to point out a few more  
things to look at as far as this sort of effort goes.

XSLT provides more than enough power to describe and extract  
information out of pages with microformats embedded. x2v demonstrates  
this. If you're looking for a "single" implementation for  
microformats, look no further than libxslt, or sabotron, or whatever  
your favorite xslt engine.

The whole model for this sort of thing is laid out in GRDDL on w3's  
website. Tim Berners Lee seems to advocate using the GRDDL model to  
transform microformats into RDF, using xslt. RDF is about as neutral  
a format for data as you're going to get.

So pretty much all the difficult problems for the sort of thing you  
want have already been solved as best they can be. The difficult part  
now is adoption.



On Mar 30, 2006, at 2:54 PM, Chris Messina wrote:

> Yeah, I didn't really think that this topic could be solved (or even
> discussed) herein.
>
> It's a nice pipedream, but I do agree falls outside the boundaries of
> the achieveable goals that we've set out w/ microformats.
>
> Chris
>
> On 3/30/06, Paul Bryson <paul at msn.com> wrote:
>> "Tantek Ç elik" wrote...
>>> In practice, this never[*] happens.  It's been tried *numerous*  
>>> times.
>>> DTD,
>>> XML Schema, etc.  In practice, key portions/features of really  
>>> *useful*
>>> specific formats (like HTML) *always* fall outside of the meta- 
>>> format, and
>>> *must* be specified in prose of a specification.  This is  
>>> specifically why
>>> I
>>> designed XMDP to be to absolute minimum of what is necessary to
>>> define/recognize a vocabulary.  I'm working on some extensions for
>>> includes
>>> (to transclude multiple XMDP profiles or portions thereof into a  
>>> single
>>> profile), but other than that, I consider XMDP "done".
>>>
>>> In the spirit of "don't reinvent what you can re-use", anyone  
>>> seriously
>>> desiring to work on a format-of-formats should *first* teach  
>>> themselves
>>> DTD,
>>> and XML Schema *at a minimum*, before having the arrogance to  
>>> think they
>>> can
>>> do better.
>>
>> Why aren't they just using DTD or SML Schema for this?  That was  
>> the first
>> thing I thought of when Joe first posted.
>>
>>
>> Atamido
>>
>>
>>
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