[uf-discuss] Re: Flock + Microformats

[Ian McKellar]

On 9/14/06, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's a wonder that engineers ever built a craft to go to the moon.

I've heard on good authority that was a hoax...
>
> Here's a usecase I've been throwing around recently:
>
> Take Ma.gnolia, which support hAtom and xFolk. Right there, you have a
> datastore. Literally, in the HTML, that's rich, parseable data.

No. You have an web page that's produced by running code against a
datastore (probably sql). The whole point of a social bookmarking
service is that you can make inferences based on the information. You
can work out who is bookmarking the same pages as you, you can work
out how tags correlate, etc. This requires you to store your
information in some kind of data store. Now when you're publishing or
sharing it makes sense to choose to present your information in some
kind of standard way so you can have interoperability and Ma.gnolia
have wisely and admirably decided to do this.

(snip crack-rock "use cases")

I believe in standards or conventions for communications between
applications, but the idea that you should repurpose publishing
formats as the internal representation of data for applications is
foolish.

Tantek, is microformatted content inside the Technorati search engine
system internally represented as HTML?

Ian (who is actually working on an interesting microformats + indexing
+ atom + opensearch side-project, which ironically will use
microformats as its internal data format)