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

[Kevin Marks]

On Aug 31, 2006, at 3:31 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> 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...

One of the key things about microformats is schema convergence. Because 
Rails makes it easy to make up your own schema and turn it into an 
application, there is a temptation to go off and invent your own at 
each point.

However, lots and lots of Rails apps have the idea of people, places 
and events, for example, and at the moment there are thousands of 
developers constructing their own schemas for these.

In the microformat world, we have some nice, tested default schemas for 
these that come with very tangible external benefits - interoperation 
with Outlook, iCal and so on.

Could building higher-level abstractions for these common datatypes 
into Rails be advantageous?