[uf-new] Question About "Magazine Article" microformat.

[Sarven Capadisli]

On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 14:55 -0700, Sunburned Surveyor wrote:
> I'm a rookie web developer and still quite new at trying to understand
> and use microformats on my own web site. I've been poking aroung the
> Microformats web site and wiki looking for a microformat for magazine
> articles posted online. I haven't been able to find anything. I'd like
> to ask if there has been any work or discussion on a microformat for
> this purpose. It may be that a magazine article is to general of a
> concept for a microformat, but some possible standard elements seemed
> to pop into my mind, like title, publication date, abstract, author,
> publication, and magazine issue.
> 
> Perhaps an XHTML compound would be more appropriate than a
> microformat? I bumped into the term XHTML compound on the process wiki
> page, but I'm not extremely clear on how it differs from a
> microformat.
> 
> At any rate, I wanted to bounce this topic by the mailing list to see
> if I was missing any previous work done in this area. I'd like to know
> if this concept has been explored, discarded as a bad idea, or if
> there is current work being done that I might help with.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> The Sunburned Surveyor

What type of a site would you consider to be a Web magazine? How would
the editorial content be different than any other form of online
publication? Consider blogs posts, news (newspaper, tv, magazine..), 

I think hAtom and the hNews extension (both are considered to be drafts,
but hAtom is fairly mature IMO) would get you majority of the way.

On top of that general representation for some publication, there are
other possibilities, and that would depend on the article itself. If the
article is an opinion or a review piece, hReview would be a good
candidate along with hAtom. Use hCard for the article author, and
datetime design (or value class) pattern for publication date - both are
reused in hAtom.

If you use Atom or RSS for some publication, you can simply use hAtom
for them too.

You might want to take a glance at one of the magazine sites I've worked
in the past: http://more.ca/ (has hAtom and hReview where appropriate).

-Sarven