[uf-discuss] RE: Microformats and RDFa not as far apart as previously thought

[Dan Brickley]

Breton Slivka wrote:
> I think this sort of counter argument is a straw man. The proposal
> from Guillaume was not to write a natural language parser that can
> parse any kind of human written date. The proposal was to parse a very
> specific and standardized format of date. If one were to write
> "Oktober", the specified behavior for parsers should be to fail, and
> possibly throw errors.
> 
> I for one, strongly agree with this approach. Essentially the problem
> with the ABBR problem that the microformat community faces, is a set
> of three restrictions, all applied, results in a set of 0 solutions.
> Every solution I've seen so far only satisfies two of those
> restrictions, and is immediately shot down by someone in the community
> who thinks the third restriction is invoilatable.
> 
> the restrictions:
> 
> 1. No information hiding
> 2. Humans first, machines second.
> 3. It must be in a format that's easily machine parsable.
> 
> You see the problem here? You guys are going to have to comprimise on
> one of these three damned restrictions, or face irrelevance!

I suggests a 4th should be taken very seriously:

4. Respect the natural language, calendar, and writing system 
preferences of the human content author.

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/