[uf-new] hAudio 1.0 Draft Release

[Manu Sporny]

Martin McEvoy wrote:
>> Toby Inkster wrote:
>> The 80/20 principle is not meant to be applied this way.
> 
> In the end Yes it is, if a property doesn't come within 80% of popular
> publishing patterns It doesn't belong in the format that is why the
> microformats process is fair.

I think that there is a misunderstanding of 80/20 that is at the core of
your "let's remove all properties that don't have at least 70% coverage"
argument. I'm not sure if it's your misunderstanding or Toby and my
misunderstanding since 80-20 isn't spelled out clearly on the
Microformats wiki, but here goes...

My understanding of the way this community uses 80-20 is like so:

We solve the markup problem for roughly 80% of the websites out there
using 20% of the attributes that could be used to solve the problem.

The Pareto principle, states that "for many events, 80% of the effects
come from 20% of the causes"[1].

Another way to look at it is this:

Quite often, 80% of a vocabulary problem can be solved using 20% of all
possible vocabulary terms used to address that problem. The Pareto
Principle is usually an "X units vs. Y units" formulation. For example:

We wear 20% of the shoes we own 80% of the time (SHOES vs. TIME).

In our case it is (WEBSITES vs. VOCABULARY TERMS). If we apply this rule
to hAudio, we would make a Pareto statement like so:

We want to solve the hAudio problem for 80% of all websites using 20% of
vocabulary terms that could be used to solve the problem.

There are 163 possible hAudio properties (aka: vocabulary terms) that
were found in the examples[2] - 20% of those would be 32 terms. Therefore:

We can solve the hAudio problem for 80% of all websites using just 32 terms.

The current hAudio vocabulary uses 15 terms - far below 80-20 rule
territory. To contrast, hCard currently uses 40+ terms.

Let's clear this up first - as all of your "removal of attributes"
argumentation is based on this premise. Is this everyone else's
understanding of how Pareto is applied to Microformats?

-- manu

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/audio-info-services-ufa