Category: News

Microformats voted best session at W3C Technical Plenary Day!

The W3C held their annual Technical Plenary Day meeting just yesterday in Mandelieu, France.

Tantek Çelik (Technorati) and Dan Connolly (W3C) moderated a session on Microformats with fellow presenters Ian Hickson, Håkon Wium Lie and Rohit Khare. Event details and links to presentations are on the wiki page for the event.

After all the sessions, the attendees voted for the best session (among eight choices) of the day and overwhelmingly chose Microformats!

Congratulations and thanks to my fellow co-moderator Dan Connolly and the presenters, and to the entire microformats community for all their hard work.

You should all be very proud of this level of recognition/appreciation by W3C members.

Tantek

P.S. For my presentation, I started off with a live demonstration (that I encouraged the audience to follow along with themselves on their on laptops, and which you too can try yourself) of going to the W3C Technical Plenary Agenda Day page, and then using the Technorati Contacts Feed service (running Brian Suda’s excellent X2V transform) to add all the contacts from that page to my address book (by simply typing in the feeds. etc. URL before the current URL in the URL field in the browser and pressing return)

http://feeds.technorati.com/contact/http://www.w3.org/2006/03/01-TechPlenAgenda.html

Followed by subscribing to the day’s events from that page to my calendar:

webcal://feeds.technorati.com/event/http://www.w3.org/2006/03/01-TechPlenAgenda.html

Thanks to Robert Bachmann with help marking up the hCards and hCalendar events of that page, Dan Connolly for checking the page in, to Brian Suda for fixing some last minute bugs in X2V, and to Ryan King for swiftly updating the Technorati Events and Contacts Feed service. They did an awesome job and everything worked flawlessly.

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Google releases Web Authoring Statistics

Google has recently released a report on Web Authoring Statistics.

The report, which used over 1 billion documents as its input, analyzes the relative frequency of various HTML elements and attributes. They also mention microformats.org as another initiative which is analyzing markup trends on the web.

The study is worth a read for anyone interested in semantic markup and especially microformats. Beware, however, that in order to see the graphs, you’ll need a browser which can properly render SVG content (FireFox 1.5 seems to work pretty well here).

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Microformats are semantic markup

Microformats, while a relatively young movement, are an outgrowth of a movement that’s been going on for quite a bit longer. For years now, web developers and designers have been abandoning purely presentational markup in favor of structural markup. As you move away from presentational markup and towards cleaner, more meaningful markup, you open up the possiblity of having not only human semantics, but also machine semantics, which though they are two different things, can often be very similar (see the wikipedia for more on this difference).

Anyway, microformats make the most sense in this context, where we assume that web developers are somewhat concerned with semantic markup and have already gone through the steps of making their markup meaningful.

I’m thinking about this because of a discussion Chris and I had yesterday in the microformats irc channel, which Chris has already blogged about.

In essence, Chris was asking for a microformat for a use-case that doesn’t quite exist yet (at least for a majority of Web users). Of course, Chris is just gonna go off and invent that use case, which is great, but just not a case for a new microformat. Part of the idea behind microformats is to standardize and codify emergent, popular behavior on the Web. If some useage of the web is too nascent to have converged, we can’t easily codify it, so we choose to pass on the problem.

However, just because Chris’s use case wasn’t appropriate for developing a new microformat, doesn’t mean he can’t use preexisting microformats and his own idiomatic semantic markup. In fact, he really should, because if his project catches on, then we may want to create a new microformat in the future, at which time his work will be great prior art.

Of course, the appropriate cliché here, would be “paving the cowpaths.

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