[uf-discuss] microformats for normal people, like my mum

[Tara Hunt]

Although I heart the idea of language for non-experts, I'm wondering
how public facing Microformats, as a general term, is.

I've thought about this before...I can see the specific microformats,
like hCard and hCal and hReview being public facing...and, in reality,
these are pretty descriptive. Maybe they just need some sort of iconic
marker (like RSS has)...which I think has been attempted before.

The one that could use a bit of massaging is XFN. FOAF, which is not a
nice spec, had a more generically used acronym.

As far as talking about Microformats under one banner, I don't know if
the distinction really needs to be made. i think that may be what POSH
was trying to say: use plain old semantic html...but even that is
talking to developers and advanced content producers.

Personally, I'd love it all to be invisible and have more tools for
non-expert content producers to input plain text into stuff that spits
out properly marked up pages and other tools (like browsers and plug
ins and sites) that consume these well-marked up pages properly.

It should look like magic. What's that Arthur C. Clarke quote about
technology and magic?

T