[uf-discuss] Should microformat features (like rel-tag) have explicit scope?

[Ryan King]

On Jan 31, 2007, at 7:07 PM, Derrick Lyndon Pallas wrote:

> If I have a parser that only knows (and only cares about) the rel- 
> tag format, it will be confused by people that use rel-tag for the  
> category property in hCard. It seems unreasonable that every  
> microformat should have to know about every other microformat,  
> especially when they are nested.

Actually I think it *is* quite reasonable to make parsers know about  
every microformat.

Microformats are designed to be easy to publish, even when that means  
that they're hard to parse. Simple economics show that it's much more  
valuable to make publishing low-cost, because the increased in  
published data will allow you to amortize the cost of writing and  
maintaining parsers across more transactions.

Also, microformats are not designed to be generic or open ended, but  
specific solutions to specific problems.

Requiring authors to add markup in order to make rel-tag's scope  
explicit makes it hard to publish the data and doesn't solve any real  
problem.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com