[uf-rest] Ruby/Rails helper for Microformats?

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi David,

On Aug 31, 2006, at 3:22 PM, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:
>> It's great to know that basic REST support will be in Rails 1.2.  I  
>> was wondering whether there's any sort of microformat support that  
>> would be appropriate for core Rails.  Thoughts?
>
> Could well be. It needs a ton more real-life usage, though. The REST  
> support is only going into Rails 1.2 after months and months of  
> thinking and real usage in the wild. So keep experimenting.

Sure, I presume we'd first want to create a gem or plug-in that  
implemented it, so we could test it.  I'm still trying to figure out  
what kind of experiments are worth doing...

The one thing I've been wondering about is whether there should be an  
easier/more automatic way of adding class names to HTML.  For example,  
one brute-force approach would be to have the default (scaffold)  
templates automatically insert the column name as the 'class'  
attribute for a given output field. In cases where the schema was  
chosen to explicitly 1-1 correspond to microformat names, that would  
give a certain amount of automatic conformance 'out of the box'.   
However, I don't know whether:

a) Those scaffolds/templates are much use in real-world Rails  
development

b) That sort of 1-1 mapping is very useful for real-world microformat  
deployments

Similarly, is there any value in adding datatype support to Rails  
output?

http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/datatypes

Feedback and brainstorming welcome...

-- Ernie P.