[uf-discuss] Re: Standardized Representation of Microformats

[Glenn Jones]

I would really like microformats community to come up with a
standardized JSON representation of microformat structures. 

Over the last few weeks I have asked number of people involved with
microformats parsers if they were interested in a common JSON
description for output and the answer seems so far has been a strong
yes. 

The main reason is that it could help us build shared test suite and
enable comparative testing between the parsers. 

Just like the move by the IE team to publicly release their test suites
so that browser manufactures can start to coalesce around a testable
understanding of a specification.  We should start to do the same for
microformat parsers. What we need first is a single output format to
test against. JSON seems to cross both client and server world well, so
it would be my choice.

It would also help people build applications more easily as they would
be able to switch from one parser/service to another and reuse code a
little more.


I am currently working on a test suite that uses a POSH pattern to
express JSON based asserts i.e.

NodeValue(vcard[0].url[2]) = http://www.flickr.com/photos/glennjonesnet/

You can see an example here
http://lab.backnetwork.com/testsuite/hcard/1.0/hcard1.htm

This is ufxtract parsing the test
http://lab.backnetwork.com/ufXtract/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flab.backnetwork.co
m%2Ftestsuite%2Fhcard%2F1.0%2Fhcard1.htm&format=test-fixture&output=text


I am coding a JavaScript test runner using ufxtract to parses the
"test-fixture" POSH pattern then I run the asserts and get a pass/fail
response. 

This is all very early prototype work, but hopefully it shows the value
of standardized JSON representation of microformat structures.


Glenn Jones 
www.glennjones.net