[uf-new] Microformats parsing, in general (was: hAudio final draft)

[Manu Sporny]

David Janes wrote:
> On 6/19/07, Manu Sporny <msporny at digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>> This is the heart of the problem.
>>
>> The Microformats community has adopted two mutually exclusive
>> philosophies:
>>
>> 1. Scope-less approach to parsing.
>> 2. Requirement to heavily re-use class names.
> 
> This is why I've been picking at this like a scab for the last week. I
> don't think we've adopted #1 at all.

Unless I misunderstood him, according to Mike Kaply, author of Operator
and THE guy implementing uFs in Firefox 3, this is exactly how it is
implemented: scope-less.

Brian Suda also confirmed that this is the case in this e-mail to the list:

http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-June/000523.html

Mind-boggling, isn't it?

We don't have to make Microformats scope-less... but somewhere along the
way, somebody made the decision that scope-less would be the best way to
go if we were to keep the uF concept simple. It sounds good in
principle, but in practice, it seems to be leading to more complexity.

An example of a group that has solved this problem the right way are the
RDFa folks (who have adopted both scope-full parsers and name spaces):

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/

-- manu