[microformats-discuss] uses of XMDP: human documentation, machine validation

[Tantek Ç elik]

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On 7/12/05 2:22 PM, "Lucas Gonze" <lucas.gonze at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/12/05, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just stepping back a second - I can see the benefit of having a
>> profile URI (to disambiguate the interpretation). What are the
>> benefits of the XMDP part - documentation? Or is anyone doing some
>> kind of processing with it?
> 
> Just documentation, but that's worth a lot since fewer developers will
> be morons in the http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/08/16/specs
> sense.

Lucas makes a very good point that a dereferencable URL which has a *human*
readable spec at the other end has *significant* benefits above and beyond
an opaque URI.  In fact, for all the squabbling that has gone on for opaque,
not-necessarily-dereferencable URIs, there's been little to no practical
benefit.

However, XMDP's are not *just* documentation.  XMDP's have a predefined
structure, and thus can be used to do some amount of algorithmic
"validation" of the use of XHTML extensions in a document.  An XMDP
validator could report on whether all the new 'rel' values, class names, and
<meta name> properties are defined in the set of profiles referenced or not.

Such an XMDP validator could be generic to XMDP and not need any special
knowledge about any specific microformat.

Tantek