zen-garden

Microformats Zen Garden

A CSS Zen Garden for microformats is essential for popular adoption. Getting something that "looks cool" for "free" should be a key attraction for convincing authors to "steal" microformatted data and cut'n'paste it into their own sites, and for that matter, to reuse style sheets for microformatted data as well.

Developers of microformat-savvy tools would also benefit from common idioms for presenting and editing microformatted data (for example, consider the impact of Apple's Address Book person-layout/edit view on many other Mac applications).

Unlike the original Zen Garden, Javascript may also prove essential to unlocking designers' flexibility: people have expressed interest in hooking hCards to maps, or this example of a renderer for hCalendar grid views.

Interested parties

People who would be willing to spend time on the garden.

• Robert Bachmann
  • could act as a point person
  • writing the sample document
  • providing styles (but he's not a good designer)

• Scott Reynen
  • could make the backend submission and switcher functionality

• Malarkey (Andy Clarke http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk)
  • Designer
  • I agreed to help by contributing design themes after talking with Kevin and Tantek

• Philip Ashlock (http://www.philaestheta.com)
  • Designer/Developer
  • I agree to help by developing interface design - clean attractive implementations
  • I have a server and domain names to contribute
  • I have live data to implement with a university website and a record label website
  • My university will essentially be paying me for development work
  • Suggestions for where efforts should be focused are most appreciated

• Chris Messina
  • Designer
  • Drupal Theme developer
  • I've done a few implementations in experimental Drupal and WordPress themes... would like to do more.

• Frances Berriman
  • New Media Developer (CSS/XHTML primarily, but also an accessibility auditor)
  • I offer to contribute time to ensuring development is accessible and adheres to WCAG.
  • I offer to help develop initial CSS templates to kick-start the showcase.
  • Will also be involved with any promotional or editorial aspects, if necessary.

Planning

Open questions

• What license should be used? --Robert Bachmann 10:34, 21 Oct 2005 (PDT)
  • My personal favorites are http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ --Robert Bachmann 14:03, 21 Oct 2005 (PDT)
• Should the example page contain examples for all microformats or should there be one example page per microformat? --Robert Bachmann 08:57, 24 Oct 2005 (PDT)
  • I think the example pages should mirror real world examples as much as practical. In some cases, microformats will be mixed, and in others they will occur independently, and it would be nice to have an environment in which to test microformat applications on such a diversity of example data. On the other hand, I can see some benefit in keeping it simple to encourage use. --Scott Reynen 12:44, 26 Oct 2005 (CST)
    • Unsure of status of this project (last edit 2005? Most interested though!) but think given recent development of hAtom and the constant growth and popularity of "blogs" as a whole, a blog page would be ideal. Perhaps a standard blog layout, containing author information (to utilise hCard and hCalendar) and many others as they are developed. It would also give the design plenty of space to write about what Microformats are all about, and show them in a really useful real world example that 99% of the viewers will find interesting (I hope). Frances Berriman 16 June 2006

• Discussion list: Use the microformats discussion list or use an extra list? (-Robert Bachmann)
  • I think a secondary list for this project would be beneficial. A digested version of current development work/status could be sent to the MF discussion lists periodically so that we can gain additional input from the MF group at large, without watering down the usual discussions that occur there. (-Frances Berriman)

• Storing files: Subversion or Mercurial? (-Robert Bachmann)

• Project name: Perhaps we need an other name? See <http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2006/02/22/homage_and_o/>. (-Robert Bachmann)
  • Having read that article, I think a new name would be beneficial. Perhaps we could discuss it with the Zen Garden creators first, and get their feedback? In the interim, it can be refered to as the MF Zen Garden, until a bright spark thinks of something better! (-Frances Berriman)

Back end prototype

Coded by Scott Reynen

• Demo: http://www.randomchaos.com/mfzen/
• Source: http://www.randomchaos.com/source/