Reuse

One of several microformats principles.

microformats 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

In general "doing what already works" (i.e. re-use) is greatly valued over "changing everything and starting from scratch" (i.e. re-invention).

Thus the burden of proof is always on those who wish to change or modify what already "works" to a great extent today. One clear instance of this is microformats' re-use of existing implied schemas (based on research of real world examples) and looking at existing widely interoperable standards as a basis for vocabulary as noted above, rather than inventing new idealistic a priori schemas or inventing new terminology for concepts already named in existing formats.

see also

• principles
• process
• "For natural language applications, trust that human language has already evolved words for the important concepts. See how far you can go by tying together the words that are already there, rather than by inventing new concepts with clusters of words. Now go out and gather some data, and see what it can do." - Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira, Google