[uf-discuss] Microformats for Q&A sites

[Gideon Greenspan]

Hi there,

I'm currently polishing a free PHP/MySQL platform for Question & Answer sites (www.question2answer.org) and want to implement microformats to the maximum extent possible. The whole point of Q&A is to structure forum-style discussions better, so microformat integration should enable aggregation and ranking of Q&A-style content across all sites that deploy my platform (and indeed others).

I'm spending a lot of time in the microformats wiki and doing my best to implement standard elements where possible. For example, a question page (that also shows related answers) will be a series of CLASS="hentry" elements. Some other elements that work well: entry-title, entry-content, rel=tag, published and author.

But there are a bunch of things that I want to make semantically available to machine readers that don't seem to touch on any of the microformat standards. For example: (a) to denote that a particular hentry is a question or an answer, (b) to flag one particular answer as the one that was selected as the best, (c) to show the net total of votes (any +/- integer) received by a question or answer.

What's the most appropriate way for me to proceed? I *could* start making elements up and modifying pages in the wiki, but I feel I should be treading more lightly until I become more familiar with microformat culture and practice.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Gideon


-- 
Gideon Greenspan
http://www.gidgreen.com/