Revision as of 20:46, 4 February 2006

Blog description format (background research)

Note: this page needs serious work and reorganization to better fit in with the microformats process. E.g. the following pages should be created using content from this page:

blog-description-examples
blog-description-formats
blog-description-brainstorming (perhaps simply rename blog-description-format-brainstorming)

Discussion Participants

Editors

Authors

Contributors

Mark Rickerby

Purpose

A microformat to describe the contents of a (we)blog. It provides a specific set of information to categorize a (we)blog. Enables easier search for humans and efficient collection of information by machines.

Here are some of examples for information that might be provided:

Details about the blog
Blog name (e.g: "John Doe's Blog")
- Blog URI (e.g: http://example.org/ )
- Lanuage used for the blog, read-able by machines (e.g: "en-US" or "de")
- Topics covered by the blog
- A short description
- Available feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.)
- A small logo image
Details about the author(s)
- Name (e.g: "John Doe")
- Organisation
- Contact details
- Geographical Location

Examples

Add real world examples here

Existing practice

Entry Wrappers

<div class="entry"></div>

The entry wrapper format has widespread usage, but seems to show up in slightly different contexts.

Some blogs (ala Wordpress) use the entry div as a wrapper to the actual post body, and wrap the whole thing in an additional div:

<div class="post">
    <div class="entry">
    </div>
</div>

A vast number of sites, including many blogs contain the main page content within a id="content" div:

<div id="content"></div>

Metadata

Wordpress uses class="postmetadata" to contain meta information, date, others use their own syntax - class="topics", class="description".

Basic Elements

Titles are usually denoted with an H2 or H3 heading. Use of class="title" seems rare, but some sites do use this explicit markup.

class="summary" is used to denote an item summary, usually in a paragraph element.

Permalinks

rel="bookmark" and rel="permalink" are both used in various places to denote a permalink to the specified entry.