[uf-discuss] Rel-tag issues, i can't create my own tagspace!

[Brian Suda]

On 2/8/07, James Craig <jcraig at apple.com> wrote:
> Quoting from About Microformats: "Designed for humans first and
> machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats
> built upon existing and widely adopted standards." This also implies
> they should be easy to implement. Co-locating your own box and
> rocking mod_rewrite can hardly be considered easy implementation of a
> "simple" data format.

--- i agree with all of this, and that is why microformats do not
force you to use your own tagspace. There are plenty of sites that can
easily be used as tagspaces[1]. You don't have to co-locate or rock
mod_rewrite, but then you can't use that as an excuse when the
alternative is to link to ANY tagspace. It is likely that most sites
will WANT to create their own tagspace so we should certainly document
problems and offer alternatives. But server setup is orthagonal to
microformats.

> Your taking the elitist way out. I believe it's a microformats
> problem to encourage adoption and to figure out a standard that will
> work for the most people. Which is better? A massive dissemination of
> usable tag metadata, or a smaller subset of tag metadata with pretty
> URLs?

--- sorry if i came across as elitist, but that is my opinion. rel-tag
is about tags, not how to setup tag spaces. I think it is a much
better approach is to NOT change the spec to correspond with broken
implementations.

To encourage adoption, i would suggest (and many have) add to the wiki
alternatives and ways to work around the limitations of servers and
software. One of the biggest complains is with IIS. (i had a look on
the wiki and it is burried) But there is software that can be
installed on Windows to allow for the creation of Tagspaces.

"More information on actually implementing a tag space would be
helpful. I wrote a tagging system on our intranet and we run IIS. So I
had to install URLrewrite (ISAPI) to create the URI /tag/tagname. We
horrible Microsoft people aren't as lucky to have Mod Rewrite."

Many of these should be pulled out onto a wiki page, so next time when
folks say "My server doesn't allow tagspaces" we can point them to the
wiki page, with alternatives, fixes, suggestions, etc.

-brian

[1] - http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag-spaces

-- 
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk