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

[Breton Slivka]

>>>
>>> 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.
>



But really, when you get right down to it, in this community there is
at least one, strongly influential person who is a proponent of each
of the three restrictions, and you're never going to make all three of
them perfectly happy. I'm vastly simplifying the case here, but I
think that's basically why the community hasn't cracked this nut yet.
It's a "wicked problem". Any solution is going to be some kind of
comprimise, and there's going to be someone in the community quite
passionately against it, so we're basically paralyzed until we can all
decide which of the three "rules" is not sacred.