criticism

Criticism

From time to time, there is criticism of a single, or all, microformats. Some is constructive, other less so.

The following list makes no judgement either way, but is included for reference, and in order that microformat advocates who wish to do so, may participate in the original discussion,.

If you choose to do so, please adopt a positive helpful manner, and act as an ambassador for the microformat community.

Unless stated, titles and dates are taken from original postings, verbatim.

Please add new items to the top of the list (they can be sorted into date-of-publication order after a week or so), and replicate the format of those already there.

Recent

• WebAIM discussion of microformat accessibility - 2007-01 / 2007-02. Includes discussion of abbr-design-pattern. Summary: criticism is nearly all from Jukka "Yucca" Korpela. If you dig deep (do your best to dig past / ignore / filter inflammatory rhetoric and ridicule, e.g. use of the term "microbabble") you can find a few points we can use to improve microformats.

2006

• Committing An Act of hEresy - Part I - 2006-12-11. Completely misrepresents microformats.
• Use of 'abbr' in microformats - 2006-09-20. Issues: use of 'abbr'; Julian dates
• Must Ignore vs. Microformats - 2006-07-12. Issues: "XML would be better"
• RDFa vs microformats - 2006-05-29. Issues: lack of co-ordination & compatibility.
• limitations of rel="tag" microformat - 2006-01-17 Summary: Under the current draft, tags and relevant tagspaces are potentially hard to create; and it's still easy to abuse the system. Humans can still be tricked and so can the machines. It's a great spec if you happen to have a compliant directory structure, but if your site doesn't match then you either recreate your entire system... or, more likely, you sadly advise the client that tags aren't happening.

See also

• accessibility
• microformats-issues
• The microformats FAQ, which answers many general criticisms/ issues that have been raised with microformats.