events/2011-03-sxsw

<entry-title>South By Southwest Interactive 2011</entry-title>

Microformats events, content and so forth at SXSWi.

The Future of Microformats Panel

Featuring:

• Frances Berriman
• Ben Ward
• Tantek Çelik
• Paul Tarjan

140 Character Summary for SXSW documentation

TBD

Brainstorming the Panel

Figure out the direction, content and general flow of the panel.

Subjects to Cover

• Summarize the state of Microformats
  • “Are microformats dead?” (not necessarily in those terms…)
    • I'm curious about the self-consciousness behind this question. Is it an actual concern? One you have heard? Or just an ironic opener? Tantek 19:28, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Major implementations (to date)
    • Show an overview slide with logos of all the sites publishing microformats
    • Google search results - screenshots of rich snippets
    • RelMeAuth
    • Could demonstrate Twitter Tweet Button using rel=me to infer data from embedding pages
    • Glenn Jones has a few neat things too
      • Possibly demo each very quickly? Glenn was asking about doing a demo too.
  • What microformats are there which are stable, ‘complete’?
    • This might be a good time to discuss potential thoughts about more formally defined microformats spec stages, e.g. draft (brainstorm consensus, ready for publishers), specification (stable multiple publisher support, implementations recommended), standard (multiple interoperable implementations) - I've brainstormed this a bit with Kevin Marks, perhaps worth further discussion at a dinner and capturing on its own wiki page).
• Cover structured data in general (perhaps briefly, just to clear up confusion)
  • do a slide comparing microformats, microdata, RDFa (when you use it, which vocabs in use) - I think this might be a good lead in for the "Microformats 2.0" introduction.
  • What's microdata? What's it for? Where is it supported?
  • RDFa: Depending on further checking of the figures cited in Peter Mika's blog post (http://tripletalk.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/rdfa-deployment-across-the-web), what vocabularies are emerging in the RDFa space?
    • If the figures are wrong though, or there aren't any major vocabularies, then can probably skip over this. — Ben
      • Yeah, I'm a little tired of the deceptive marketing by the RDFa crowd (that article, and Ben's and Kevin Marks' trivial critiques (c.f. their twitters) are a prime example) and frankly in such a short session we shouldn't give such deceptions any time. However I *would* suggest a backup slide to debunk it (e.g. showing adoption of the class attribute or meta keyword in comparison to RDFa) when the inevitable one RDFa question comes up from the one RDFa person in the crowd. Tantek
• What's happening this year?
  • Any new vocabularies expected to be stable?
  • vCard 4.0, and how that will tie into hCard
    • updates to hCard in general hCard 1.0.1, 1.1 - Tantek
  • HTML5, and how the time element affects hCalendar, hAtom, etc.
    • Good to mention X2V/H2VX update to support HTML5 and time/datetime here. - Tantek
  • “Microformats 2” (datatype prefixes, generic tree parsing.)
    • If this is mentioned at all, assuming Tantek is even continuing this work at all(?), I am firmly of the view that it needs to framed as an exploration around a use case, not an accepted progression of microformats as a whole. — Ben
      • Yes it is continuing :) I agree with the general thinking behind Ben's framing, that is, we need to stay practical. Direct use cases are one subset of real world problems (which is how microformats started) that microformats solve. What's driving Microformats 2.0 *is* the solving of specific real world problems that sufficient developers have encountered (i.e. not just hypothetical) that it's now finally worth spending the time to solve them. And yes, the goal would be to have Microformats 2.0 "ready to use/parse" for introduction at this session, possibly with some publisher/parser support already available (thinking Twitter, Facebook, X2V, Operator offhand). - Tantek
  • If we're covering individually led efforts though, Ben would like to frame up the concept of rich data containers and expanding parsing rules for those (vcalendar TV listings and the like.)
    • You know the drill, start an exploration wiki page on the subject :) - Tantek
• Community Management? Being that this has been (is?) one of the larger challenges the microformats community has had, is it worth bringing up, lessons learned etc.?
• Accessibility? Since the value-class-pattern has solved these problems, is this worth mentioning at all?

Subjects not to cover at all

• meta keywords
• microdata on its own
• RDFa on its own
• ontology/ontologies (lose most the crowd just by mentioning the word)
• why invisible metadata fails (perhaps backup slides for Q&A response only)