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

[Breton Slivka]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri at danbri.org> wrote:
> 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
>

I thought that was implied by restriction #2, and thus leads to
proponents of restriction #3 getting in a hoot because perfectly
satisfying #2 is too hard.

so from there you can either comprimise #2 or #1 to satisfy proponents
of #3. violating #2 is a bad idea, but if you violate #1, Tantek steps
in and says you can't do that. Since it's difficult to overcome the
influence and authority of Tantek in this community, comprimising #3
is the only way you can go. Otherwise the argument is just going to go
around in circles forever.