issues

Issues which apply to more than one microforamt.

Bloated Format

The Problem

Unfortunately, current microformats implementation consume a vast amount of space. The complexity will increase even more, when wanting to solve/add more complex issues. A direct consequence of this is a bloated format:

• some of the markup is really bloated
  • instead of a number, we end sometimes with a whole new paragraph of markup
  • however, in order to be complete, the markup might need to be so
  • nevertheless, having a page with 1000 data points will be a horror scenario

Therefore, I proposed to open this new brainstorming session/page on how to efficiently implement the microformats in web pages.

Ideas/ Solutions

If we think a little bit back about css, one of the main reasons of its development was:

* to separate content from style

• • page code becomes more easy to understand
  • and to maintain
  • and often the size shrinks significantly

We must learn this lesson when dealing with microformats. Specifically, the following issues are important:

• extensive microformat markup inside the page code will significantly reduce the readability of the code
• repeating the markup will increase page size
• it will become more difficult to maintain/change the page

Solution

• define microformat classes
  • e.g. in the page header, or
  • in a separate file (see later)
• define abbreviations (qasi tags) to those classes
  • use actually only the abbrevioations inside the web page, instead of the whole paragraph of markup

• define the microformat classes inside a separate file (similarly to the css)
  • this file needs NOT to be downloaded automatically
    • you do NOT need it for displaying the data
    • it is only needed when wanting to import the data somewhere
    • most viewers, however, only view the data
  • let the browser automatically download this file, only IF:
    • there is enough bandwidth
    • the user wants to copy that data
    • the user wants to explicitly save the whole page
  • when the user wants to copy an item
    • the web browser should acces that microformats additional page and
    • download only the relevant class (NO need to actually download the whole page)
    • EXTEND html protocol to be able to download web-file/class-defined-inside-file without beeing necessary to download the whole file

Requirements

New Tags:

• <struct> ... </struct>: like the C/C++ struct, will define the microformats structure
• ... : will define the part inside struct that should be replaced
• : similarly to point above, but NOT displayed by browser
  • could be shortend to <v>, to further reduce file size

Examples

Lets take this code:

  Book Title

     Chapter Title

We would define this in the header like this:

<struct>
MyName{

}
</struct>

or in a separate microformats file (NO struct needed):

MyName{

}

Inside the web page we use:

<struct class="MyName">
  This is the first variable
  This text is put in the 2nd variable
</struct>

IF, one variable should NOT be displayed by the browser, we would use instead, e.g.:

 N 37° 24.491 
 W 122° 08.313

Would become:

• the microformats definition page

MyGeoStructure{

}

• the web page

<struct class="MyGeoStructure">
  N 37° 24.491
  W 122° 08.313
</struct>

- discussion opened by Leonard Mada