[uf-discuss] Fwd: [whatwg] Predefined classes are gone

[Chris Messina]

I suppose I don't disagree with Maciej's point, but primarily take
umbrage with the seemingly "random" classes that were going to be used
as predefined values. "Copyright" was the biggest offender -- and a
symptom of fflawed thinking -- given the established and widely used
rel-license microformat.

If the standards groups did more of what you say they do and simply
codify existing best or common practices, then I would have fewer
concerns about their work. Indeed, I see a way for microformats to fit
into and contribute to their work. To date, there seems little
involvement (on the whole) from the standards groups in familiarizing
themselves with our methodologies or work so far (please do prove me
wrong if this is not the case).

Furthermore, I heard that the W3C has a deadline of -- get this --
2015 for their HTML5 work now that they've acquiesced to the WHATWG's
work.

By then shouldn't the Semantic Web have been built? :)

In all seriousness, I think that there are some good ideas in HTML5
and XHTML2. The predefined classes that seemed arbitrarily decided
upon were not among them; better would have been a request for input
from the microformats community on which microformats should start
making their way into the standards (if any should at all). It's great
to see the progress being made in those domains, but I have to wonder
whether it will be too foreign and too late by the time the standard
is settled. What can be done in the meantime to make our work more
relevant and practical while we wait for the next evolution of the
web's markup languages?

Chris


On 5/23/07, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On May 22, 2007, at 11:35 PM, Ciaran McNulty wrote:
>
> > On 5/23/07, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
> >> I find it questionable to argue that microformats.org defining
> >> semantics for particular classes is generally good, but to assume
> >> that W3C or WHATWG defining them is ill-conceived. Note that HTML has
> >> always predefined some "rel" values, and this has not stopped
> >> microformats from defining other rel values, some of which will be
> >> folded back in to the HTML spec.
> >
> > To me the difference is that Microformats have a system for indicating
> > whether they are in use (although it's not used widely) in the
> > @profile mechanism,
>
> The fact that content does not use it and data extraction tools
> ignore it makes this a meaningless distinction in practice.
>
> > whereas anything 'hard coded' into the HTML spec will not be optional.
>
> I would once again draw the analogy to "rel".
>
> Anyway, I think most of the predefined class names in the HTML 5 spec
> were not really jusfied but I'd like to see things like the geo
> microformat possibly get folded into HTML over time.
>
> Regards,
> Maciej
>
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>


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Chris Messina
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