microformats

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microformats

What are microformats?

microformats are:

microformats are not:

  • a new language
  • infinitely extensible and open-ended
  • an attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
  • a whole new approach that throws away what already works today
  • a panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions
  • defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean
  • any of the above

the microformats 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 better than invisible metadata
    • adapt to current behaviors and usage patterns, e.g. (X)HTML, blogging
  • reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
  • modularity / embeddability
    • design to be reused and embedded inside existing formats and microformats
  • enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services
    • explicitly encourage "spirit of the Web"
    • this makes no sense to me