View source for events/2006-03-01-w3c-plenary-microformats

<h1>Microformats panel at W3C Plenary Day</h1>

During the [http://www.w3.org/2006/03/01-TechPlenAgenda.html W3C Plenary Day] in the middle of the [http://www.w3.org/2005/12/allgroupoverview.html W3C All Group Meetings Week] in Mandelieu, FRANCE.

Presenters, please see To Do section.

__TOC__

== To Do ==

* ASAP: DanC, please add [[hcalendar|hCalendar]] and [[hcard|hCard]] markup to [http://www.w3.org/2006/03/01-TechPlenAgenda.html TP agenda]. ''I haven't found time. Anybody else got time to do the markup? I can probably install it.''

* All presenters should confirm that presentations are done and ready.  Link to them from here as soon as possible (even drafts) so we can all review and see where everyone is at.
** Ian Hickson: started looking at some of the data Google didn't publish from our last billion-document run, to see if there's anything fun to show. I think I'll show the class names coloured based on how semantic they are, maybe.
** Tantek Çelik: not done yet
** Håkon Wium Lie: status unknown
** Rohit Khare: status unknown
** Dan Connolly: [http://www.w3.org/2003/g/talk62/slides slides] drafted

== Summary ==

This is the summary of the panel as sent to Steve Bratt as of 2006-02-17, and published at http://www.w3.org/2006/03/01-TechPlenAgenda.html :

Session 3:  Microformats

Description: Leveraging the widespread adoption and understanding of CSS and semantic (X)HTML among web designers and publishers, microformats are a set of simple, practical, open data formats that are designed for humans first and machines second. Microformats are designed by researching and adapting to current human web publishing behaviors and usage patterns, and then reusing bits of existing widely adopted standards. This session will demonstrate the capabilities that have been quickly developed with microformats on today's Web, review current microformats, and open discussion on what microformats and related efforts mean for the future of the Web..

Moderators: Tantek Çelik (Technorati) and Don Connolly (W3C)

Presenters and Topics:

* Ian Hickson (Google) - "A billion documents and no semantics anywhere"
* Tantek Çelik (Technorati) - "What are microformats?"
* Håkon Wium Lie (Opera) - "Cascading Markup Languages — boom!"
* Rohit Khare (CommerceNet) - "Where Angle Brackets Fear to Tread"
* Dan Connolly (W3C) - "Microformats for practical Semantic Web deployment"

== Session Descriptions ==

These are session descriptions from each presenter.  

Presenters, feel free to tweak/update your session descriptions.

=== Ian Hickson ===

"A billion documents and no semantics anywhere"

The "semantics" in the title refers to the "semantics" given to the Web by 
HTML, as opposed to the "semantics" that are actually put in the Web by 
the humans. Microformats can document existing practices (especially based 
on the data from studies of existing documents) so that the existing 
content can be given "official" "semantics".

Basically my talk will be something like "ooo look pretty shiny billion 
documents lots of data that shows people use HTML not like it was intended 
but we can reverse engineer microformats out of existing practices to 
obtain useful information".

=== Tantek Çelik ===

"What are microformats?"

How did we get here?  Picking up (hopefully) where the previous talk left off, a brief review of recent web authoring trends, a timeline of the ideas that formed microformats, and demonstrations how hCard and hCalendar are being put to good use today by publishers, browsers, and end users alike.

=== Håkon Wium Lie ===

"Cascading Markup Languages — boom!"

Cascading in CSS allows descigners to not have to provide the full presentation of a
document, they only need to supply the deltas from the html default
style sheet; cascading does the rest. In the same way, microformats
builds on the (admittantly shallow) semantics of HTML; you don't have
to create a new laguage to describe more semantics, you just provide
the deltas on top of HTML.

This is one of the design principles that CSS and microformat share,
others inlcude: simplicity, author-friendliness, an evolutionary
approach.

Boom will be provided as an example.

=== Rohit Khare ===

"Where Angle Brackets Fear to Tread"

XML has been a wild success almost everywhere in the information technology universe *except* for adding semantically-rich information to ordinary Web pages. Once upon a time, we were supposed to wish for <code><nowiki><price></nowiki></code> elements sprinkled about our HTML -- why is are we supposed to be so much more excited to see class="price" this time around? Dr. Khare will speak about his experiences with both xml and microformats in light of a recent project, hListing (for classified ads), and writing a parser and search engine for microformats in general.

=== Dan Connolly ===

"Microformats for practical Semantic Web deployment"

Microformats provide just enough structure to use semantic web technologies like RDF, OWL, and SPARQL on data in ordinary web pages. Dan will relate a few case studies and demonstrate some tools.