issues

Issues which apply to more than one microforamt.

This should be a brainstorming session trying to tackle such general problems as microformats implementation, microformats efficiency and other advanced concepts.

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 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
• <v> ... </v>: this will define the variable inside the struct that should be replaced
• <v ... />: similarly to above, but this will NOT be displayed by the browser
  • <v> is a shorthand for var, to further reduce file size

Examples

Lets take this code:

 <div class="hcite">
  <div class="book">
   <span class="fn">Book Title</span>
   <div class="chapter">
      <span class="fn">Chapter Title</span>
   </div>
  </div>
 </div>

We would define this in the header like this:

 <struct>
 MyName{
  <div class="hcite">
   <div class="book">
    <span class="fn"><v /></span>
    <div class="chapter">
       <span class="fn"><v /></span>
    </div>
   </div>
  </div>
 }
 </struct>

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

 MyName{
  <div class="hcite">
   <div class="book">
    <span class="fn"><v /></span>
    <div class="chapter">
       <span class="fn"><v /></span>
    </div>
   </div>
  </div>
 }

Inside the web page we use:

 <struct class="MyName">
   <v>1st variable</v>
   <v>2nd variable</v>
 </struct>

IF, one variable should NOT be displayed by the browser, we would use <v val="..." /> instead (the val= could be omitted), e.g.:

 <div class="geo">
  <abbr class="latitude" title="37.408183">N 37° 24.491</abbr> 
  <abbr class="longitude" title="-122.13855">W 122° 08.313</abbr>
 </div>

Would become:

• inside the microformats definition page write:

 MyGeoStructure{
  <div class="geo">
   <abbr class="latitude" title=v><v /></abbr> 
   <abbr class="longitude" title=v><v /></abbr>
  </div>
 }

• the code inside the web page:

 <struct class="MyGeoStructure">
   <v "37.408183" /><v>N 37° 24.491</v>
   <v "-122.13855" /><v>W 122° 08.313</v>
 </struct>

- discussion opened by Leonard Mada