[uf-discuss] hCode microformat proposal

[anders conbere]

On 1/25/07, Tim White <tjameswhite at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 1/25/2007, Anders said:
> >I've added a page to the wiki to catalog examples of source code being
> >published online and the ways they do that.
> >
> >http://microformats.org/wiki/code-examples
> >
> >I suppose I'll be filling that in over the next couple of days.
> >
> >~ Anders
> >
>
> snip
>
> >> > > 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.
>
>
> At first blush it looks like this would fit in and existing proposal, something like hReview. It seems to have enough fields to cover it  (though this might abuse the intent of hReview; i.e. we aren't reviewing a piece of code, but distributing it).
>
> You may also want to take a look at the hProduct discussion (http://microformats.org/wiki/hproduct-proposal).
>
> As is evidenced by your blog post and the wiki page, it looks like about the only thing not covered by an existing microformat is the code itself, but I think that it could work in hProduct's description field.
>
> ~Tim

I agree what I'm proposing is more of a "macro-format" or a
conglomerate of several microformats.  I think the biggest thing that
distinguishes it from something like hproduct or hreview (and maybe it
could be squeezed in there with a little bit of work, but hear me out)
is in two cases.

First is in consumption, with hproduct and hreview we have by and
large a single class of consumption, reviews, products etc.  Tools
used to scrape for those will be wildy different than the tools needed
to scrape for code samples.

Second is the inclusion of licensing and language options which seem
wildly out of place in either of those formats but I think are very
important to the webs use of code samples.

I'm no micorformat expert so I really don't know what is possible with
subclassing or mushing, but those are two reasons that stand out in my
head simply squeezing a code sample into one of those microformats
might be a bad idea.

~ Anders