principles
Revision as of 16:14, 3 September 2007 by Tantek (talk | contribs) (drafted (finally) by moving content from microformats)
microformats principles
A key differentiating factor between microformats and other formats are the principles upon which microformats have been researched, designed, and developed.
summary of key principles
- solve a specific problem
- start as simple as possible
- solve simpler problems first
- make evolutionary improvements
- design for humans first, machines second
- be presentable and parsable
- visible data is much better for humans than invisible metadata
- adapt to current behaviors and usage patterns, e.g. (X)HTML, blogging
- ease of authoring is important
- reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
- semantic, meaningful (X)HTML, i.e. POSH. See SemanticXHTMLDesignPrinciples for more details.
- existing microformats
- as a whole, e.g. use hCard for representing people
- in part, reusing particular semantic class names, following microformats naming principles
- well established schemas from interoperable RFCs
- modularity / embeddability
- design to be reused and embedded inside existing formats and microformats
- enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services
- explicitly encourage the original "spirit of the Web"
Related Principles we re-use from other design paradigms:
- DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
- Least Surprise
- Pareto Principle (80/20)
- Data Integrity. One of the common objectives which many of the principles help achieve is data integrity.
- Visible data = more accurate data. By designing for humans first and making the data presentable (thus viewed and verified by humans), the data is inevitably more accurate not only to begin with (as errors are easily/quickly noticed by those viewing the pages/sites), but over time as well, in that changes are noticed, and if data becomes out-of-date or obsolete, that's more liklely to be noticed as well. This is in direct contrast to "side files" and invisible data like that contained in
<meta>tags. - Not repeating yourself (following DRY) - means there are fewer chances for inconsistency
- Multi-language integrity. Perhaps not a principle, but many of those involved with microformats have found that consistently using UTF-8 helps ensure that the human text content itself is not corrupted, especially when using non-ASCII7 characters.
- Visible data = more accurate data. By designing for humans first and making the data presentable (thus viewed and verified by humans), the data is inevitably more accurate not only to begin with (as errors are easily/quickly noticed by those viewing the pages/sites), but over time as well, in that changes are noticed, and if data becomes out-of-date or obsolete, that's more liklely to be noticed as well. This is in direct contrast to "side files" and invisible data like that contained in
Many of the principles were/are based on explicitly inverting assumptions from typical technology / format development.