[uf-discuss] Visible Data...a Microformat requirement?

[Ciaran McNulty]

On 10/23/06, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, what if your take on this problem and use-case?

I'm not Tantek, but you're use-case seems eminently reasonable, and
I'd suggest could be solved using an appropriate new link at rel, and
then convicing the search engines to pay attention to it ;-)

However, it doesn't really fit in with the aims of Microformats with a
big 'M', which are "Designed for humans first and machines second"
[1].

The scope of what's considered a Microformat is deliberately narrow,
and is primarily aimed at adding extra semantics to data that's
already present in documents.

XFN, for instance, defines a set of @rel values to enrich the
semantics of linking to other people's sites/blogs/etc., but it's
unlikely that XFN would have been proposed if there wasn't already a
huge precendent of people linking to each other's sites, and a
percieved need for that extra information to be added to the existing
links.

It's very hard to follow the Microformats principle of 'pave the
cowpaths' if the information you're trying to enrich isn't currently
present in the documents, which means hidden data is fairly heavily
discouraged.

Again, that's not to say it's not a good idea, it's something I'd be
quite interested in too.

-Ciaran McNulty

  [1] http://microformats.org/about/