[uf-discuss] generic microformat parsing heuristics?

[Phil Dawes]

Hi Tantek,

Tantek Çelik wrote:

 > Phil,
 >
 > Take a look at hCard parsing:
 >
 >  http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing
 >
 > Much of which is embodied there generalizes to other microformats.
 >

Excellent - many thanks.

Out of interest, do you think that a generic microformats parser _can_
be written?
(e.g. something that could parse hcard, hcal et al out of xhtml without
prior knowledge of their precise schemas?)

I ask because we're starting to wonder about embedding our own internal
microformats into webapps at work[1] (e.g. maybe for financial reference
data), but we'd want to be able to use off-the-shelf generic tools to
parse, aggregate and query the custom data.

Thanks again,

Phil

[1] http://www.drkw.com/