[uf-discuss] Microformat h-names contradict the process documentation

[Frances Berriman]

On 22 March 2010 20:38, Andriy Drozdyuk <drozzy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see the microformats in the upcoming drafts section all named:
> hAtom, hAudio, hListing, hMedia, hNews, hProduct, hRecipe, hResume, hReview
>
> While in the actual documentation:
> http://microformats.org/wiki/process
>
> one can find this philosophy:
> "DO NOT start with even labeling your effort "hXYZ". This is a very
> common mistake."
>
> What is the purpose of naming things with "h" prefixes and using all
> kinds of abbreviations? (e.g. "adr" instead of "address").
> It's already on the web (hence html) - shouldn't it be clear that it's (h)tml?
>
> I was just wandering if anyone else ever thought about it, or am I
> just being silly, or missing something?
> Thanks,

Good question.

It's more for the benefit of parsers.  It's a sort of simple
name-spacing technique.  Imagine trying to look for recipe
microformats in HTML - the class name "recipe" may be used for all
sorts of correct reasons, but a microformat parser is specifically
interested in the instance where it's going to retrieve the right kind
of data. Looking for "hRecipe" is much easier.  Of course, you can
infer whether the data is useful from it's child elements, but it's a
quicker solution in many cases (and isn't the universal solution).

I think the comment you quoted is a slightly different topic - It's
just advice that step 1. of defining a new microformat is not naming
it :)