[uf-discuss] awesome examples of microformats, faqs

[Drew McLellan]

On 8 May 2006, at 10:14, Chris Messina wrote:

>> The stories are right there, linked directly from the specs, you  
>> just need
>> to take the time to click on them and read through.
>
> This is backwards. The stories should link to the specs, not the other
> way around. I think this is what I've been intuitively feeling for a
> long time -- and a great deal of the inspiration for opening the
> separate Practical Microformats wiki (microformats.pbwiki.com). I want
> this for Microformats.org:
>
> http://rubyonrails.org/
>
> They do a great job hyping, promoting and marketing their great
> project. I think that we have something equally profound and useful on
> our hands, but we're totally inaccessible save for the few who dare to
> brave the depths of the wiki. This needs to change -- and can be done
> fairly easily with some focused effort.

At the moment we have dozens of really great examples of people  
publishing with microformats and lots of great scripts and methods of  
consuming microformats. I think perhaps what we're missing is some  
good examples of the full round-trip.

For me, this is where Microsoft's live clipboard demo really captures  
the imagination. I shows how structured data (and yay, it's a uF) can  
really benefit user experience, in this case.

I think what Chris is getting at (and forgive me if this is wrong,  
Chris ...) is that we can all see the massive benefits of  
microformats - but it's all slightly academic. As technical folk, we  
know that structured data is important and valuable, and therefore is  
practical to us. However, your average web designer isn't used to  
knocking up perl scripts to parse juicy data out of a page to use for  
something awesome. It's this crowd that needs to see practical  
examples of full round-trip use (like live clipboard) before they'll  
'get it' and see the benefit enough to start implementing in earnest.

Is that right Chris?

My question would be - so what full round-trip examples do we have?  
Let's showcase them. If we need more examples, let's brainstorm some  
ideas and get stuff built.

drew.