[uf-discuss] hCode microformat proposal

[anders conbere]

On 1/24/07, Colin Barrett <timber at lava.net> wrote:
> On Jan 24, 2007, at 7:30 PM, anders conbere wrote:
>
> > All over the web there are code snippets and code examples, and just
> > plain people showing of little programs they've written.  This data is
> > typical acompanied by an author or list of authors, a lisence, the
> > language type and version and various other bits of meta data.  This
> > seems to me to be an excelent place for microformats.
> >
> > First as a way to standardize this collection of metadata which might
> > help decrease the confusion over licensing and various other issues
> > that plague online code examples.
> >
> > Second because this is data that in and of itself does nothing on the
> > web.  It has to be downloaded, and run in various other applications
> > to have any use.  Standardizing the format would allow for easy
> > download, collection and use of this data.
> >
> > I wrote a little proposal regarding what I see as being a possible
> > schema etc. at http://anders.conbere.org/posts/code-microformat/
>
> The first step is not to write a schema but to create a wiki page
> documenting existing examples of pages. Microformats is about paving
> the cow paths, so one of the major inputs in our design process is
> seeing what's already out there.

Right, if you look at that link, I just picked a few largish sites
that already include chunks of metadata in the document with inline
code.  What I didn't want to do was post a 4 page document to the
mailing list detailing everything I've been looking at.  But rather
keep things short here, and offer people who were interested somewhere
to look at what I was proposing.
>
> I would recommend looking at various pastebin websites and some
> programming oriented blogs. Something else you might want to also
> consider looking at is lxr (there's an install for mozilla at
> lxr.mozilla.org).

Similarly Track with projects like Django or Ruby On Rails, as well as
sites like W3schools.
>
> > I don't have any real experience doing this kind of stuff so I welcome
> > comments, suggestions of criticism.  Really I just want to attempt to
> > get discussion started.
>
> The best way to do that is to create the brainstorming pages and do
> the leg work there. Once you have numerous examples, the process of
> figuring out what's common and what's not can begin. Finding examples
> in the wild is the most important step!

Yup! The wiki says to start here though, I didn't want to go around
making wiki pages without following the instructions.  If people think
it's alright I would love to move what I already have to the wiki and
start looking for distinct examples of how this sort of things is
already being applied.
>
> Hope that helps,
> -Colin
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